"THAT GREAT CITY"

In a previous post,, I referred you to Revelation chapter 18. I now refer you to a portion of that scripture as follows:

Revelation 18:21-24 (NIV)
21 Then a mighty angel picked up a boulder the size of a large millstone and threw it into the sea, and said: “With such violence the great city of Babylon will be thrown down, never to be found again.
22 The music of harpists and musicians, flute players and trumpeters, will never be heard in you again. No workman of any trade will ever be found in you again. The sound of a millstone will never be heard in you again.
23 The light of a lamp will never shine in you again. The voice of bridegroom and bride will never be heard in you again. Your merchants were the world’s great men. By your magic spell all the nations were led astray.
24 In her was found the blood of prophets and of the saints, and of all who have been killed on the earth.”


[1]
[1] The Holy Bible : New International Version. electronic ed. Grand Rapids : Zondervan, 1996, c1984

The best interpreter of Scripture is Scripture. In order to discover which "Great City" he was speaking of, I refer you to the first, and most important occurrence of the designation “the great city” is in Rev. 11:8, which reads, “And [the two witnesses’] bodies will lie in the street of the great city which is spiritually called Sodom and Egypt, where also their Lord was crucified”

And then, from the Old Testament Prophet, Jeremiah, there are these remarkable prophecies concerning Jerusalem that are echoed in the Book of Revelation chapter 18. Please note:

Jeremiah 7:34 (NIV)
34 I will bring an end to the sounds of joy and gladness and to the voices of bride and bridegroom in the towns of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem, for the land will become desolate.

Jeremiah 16:9 (NIV)
9 For this is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says: Before your eyes and in your days I will bring an end to the sounds of joy and gladness and to the voices of bride and bridegroom in this place.

Jeremiah 25:10 (NIV)
10 I will banish from them the sounds of joy and gladness, the voices of bride and bridegroom, the sound of millstones and the light of the lamp.

[1]
[1] The Holy Bible : New International Version. electronic ed. Grand Rapids : Zondervan, 1996, c1984

There is no doubt that these Scriptures refer to "That Great City" as being Jerusalem. I believe it is the "system" that will be destroyed, not God's chosen people, the Jews.

My earnest belief is that God is pointing to the ultimate destruction of an apostate system...not the Jewish nation, but perhaps a political-economic system that is Anti-Christ.

That Great City--Baylon Has Fallen!

I ask you to read this 18th chapter of Revelation. Somehow, it relates to the witness of what we see happening before our eyes in the capital markets of the world. Is this a world-wide system that is going to fall? I urge each to prepare your heart for tough days ahead. Jesus is coming soon! The signs are all around.

Revelation 18 (NIV)
1 After this I saw another angel coming down from heaven. He had great authority, and the earth was illuminated by his splendor.
2 With a mighty voice he shouted: “Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great! She has become a home for demons and a haunt for every evil spirit, a haunt for every unclean and detestable bird.
3 For all the nations have drunk the maddening wine of her adulteries. The kings of the earth committed adultery with her, and the merchants of the earth grew rich from her excessive luxuries.”
4 Then I heard another voice from heaven say: “Come out of her, my people, so that you will not share in her sins, so that you will not receive any of her plagues;
5 for her sins are piled up to heaven, and God has remembered her crimes.
6 Give back to her as she has given; pay her back double for what she has done. Mix her a double portion from her own cup.
7 Give her as much torture and grief as the glory and luxury she gave herself. In her heart she boasts, ‘I sit as queen; I am not a widow, and I will never mourn.’
8 Therefore in one day her plagues will overtake her: death, mourning and famine. She will be consumed by fire, for mighty is the Lord God who judges her.
9 “When the kings of the earth who committed adultery with her and shared her luxury see the smoke of her burning, they will weep and mourn over her.
10 Terrified at her torment, they will stand far off and cry: “ ‘Woe! Woe, O great city, O Babylon, city of power! In one hour your doom has come!’
11 “The merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her because no one buys their cargoes any more—
12 cargoes of gold, silver, precious stones and pearls; fine linen, purple, silk and scarlet cloth; every sort of citron wood, and articles of every kind made of ivory, costly wood, bronze, iron and marble;
13 cargoes of cinnamon and spice, of incense, myrrh and frankincense, of wine and olive oil, of fine flour and wheat; cattle and sheep; horses and carriages; and bodies and souls of men.
14 “They will say, ‘The fruit you longed for is gone from you. All your riches and splendor have vanished, never to be recovered.’
15 The merchants who sold these things and gained their wealth from her will stand far off, terrified at her torment. They will weep and mourn
16 and cry out: “ ‘Woe! Woe, O great city, dressed in fine linen, purple and scarlet, and glittering with gold, precious stones and pearls!
17 In one hour such great wealth has been brought to ruin!’ “Every sea captain, and all who travel by ship, the sailors, and all who earn their living from the sea, will stand far off.
18 When they see the smoke of her burning, they will exclaim, ‘Was there ever a city like this great city?’
19 They will throw dust on their heads, and with weeping and mourning cry out: “ ‘Woe! Woe, O great city, where all who had ships on the sea became rich through her wealth! In one hour she has been brought to ruin!
20 Rejoice over her, O heaven! Rejoice, saints and apostles and prophets! God has judged her for the way she treated you.’ ”
21 Then a mighty angel picked up a boulder the size of a large millstone and threw it into the sea, and said: “With such violence the great city of Babylon will be thrown down, never to be found again.
22 The music of harpists and musicians, flute players and trumpeters, will never be heard in you again. No workman of any trade will ever be found in you again. The sound of a millstone will never be heard in you again.
23 The light of a lamp will never shine in you again. The voice of bridegroom and bride will never be heard in you again. Your merchants were the world’s great men. By your magic spell all the nations were led astray.
24 In her was found the blood of prophets and of the saints, and of all who have been killed on the earth.”

The Man Who Never Was

This op-ed speaks to the questions I have in my mind for the man who would be President of the United States and bring much change, but I still do not know the specifics of that change or much about who he is.

Obama Remains Unknown

Tony Blankley

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

OP-ED:

The mainstream media have gone over the line and are now straight out propagandists for the Obama campaign. While they have been liberal and blinkered in their worldview for decades, in 2007-08 for the first time, the major media are consciously covering for one candidate for president and consciously knifing the other. This is no longer journalism — it is simply propaganda. (The American left-wing version of the Volkischer Beobachter cannot be far behind.) And as a result, we are less than seven weeks away from possibly electing a president who has not been thoroughly and even half way honestly presented to the country by our watchdogs — the press.

The image of Barack Obama that the press has presented is not a fair approximation of the real man. They have consciously ignored whole years in his life, and showed a lack of curiosity about such gaps that bespeaks a lack of journalistic instinct. Thus, the public image of Mr. Obama is of a "Man who never was." I take that phrase from a 1956 movie about a real life WWII British intelligence operation to trick the Germans into thinking the Allies were going to invade Greece, rather than Italy, in 1943. Operation "Mincemeat" involved the acquisition of a human corpse dressed as a Maj. William Martin, R.M. and put into the sea near Spain. Attached to the corpse was a brief-case containing fake letters suggesting that the Allied attack would be against Sardinia and Greece.

To make the operation credible, British intelligence created a fictional life for the corpse — a letter from a lover, tickets to a London theater, all the details of a life — but not the actual life of the dead young man whose corpse was being used. So, too, the man the media has presented to the nation as Mr. Obama is not the real man.

The mainstream media ruthlessly and endlessly repeats any McCain gaffes, while ignoring Obama gaffes. You have to go to weird little Internet sites to see all the stammering and stuttering that Mr. Obama needs before getting out a sentence fragment or two. But all you see on the networks is an eventual one or two clear sentences from Mr. Obama. Nor do you see Mr. Obama's ludicrous gaffe that Iran is a tiny country and no threat to us. Nor his 57 American states gaffe. Nor his forgetting, if he ever knew, that Russia has a veto in the United Nations. Nor his whining and puerile "come on" when he is being challenged. This is the kind of editing one would expect from Goebbels' disciples, not Cronkite's.

More appalling, NBC's "Saturday Night Live" suggested that Gov. Sarah Palin's husband had sex with his own daughters. That scene was written with the assistance of Al Franken, Democratic Party candidate for Senate in Minnesota. Talk about incest.

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., greets supporters before his speech in downtown Charlotte, North Carolina on September 21, 2008. (UPI Photo/Nell Redmond)

But worse than all the unfair and distorted reporting and image projecting, is the shocking gaps in Mr. Obama's life that are not reported at all. The major media simply has not reported on Mr. Obama's two years at Columbia University in New York, where, among other things, he lived a mere quarter mile from former terrorist Bill Ayers— after which they both ended up as neighbors and associates in Chicago. Mr. Obama denies more than a passing relationship with Mr. Ayers. Should the media be curious? In only two weeks the media has focused on all the colleges Mrs. Palin has attended, her husband's driving habits 20 years ago and the close criticism of Mrs. Palin's mayoral political opponents. But in two years they haven't bothered to see how close Mr. Obama was with the terrorist Ayers.

Nor have the media paid any serious attention to Mr. Obama's rise in Chicago politics — how did honest Obama rise in the famously sordid Chicago political machine with the full support of Boss Daley? Despite the great — and unflattering details on Mr. Obama's Chicago years presented in David Freddoso's new book, the mainstream media continues to ignore both the facts and the book. It took a British publication, the Economist, to give Mr. Freddoso's book a review with fair comment.

The public image of Mr. Obama as an idealistic, post-race, post-partisan, well-spoken and honest young man with the wisdom and courage befitting a great national leader is a confection spun by a willing conspiracy of Mr. Obama, his publicist David Axelrod and most of the senior editors, producers and reporters of the national media.

Perhaps that is why the National Journal's respected correspondent Stuart Taylor has written that "the media can no longer be trusted to provide accurate and fair campaign reporting and analysis." That conspiracy has not only photo-shopped out all of Mr. Obama's imperfections (and dirtied up his opponent Mr. McCain's image), but it has put most of his questionable history down the memory hole.

The public will be voting based on the idealized image of the man who never was. If he wins, however, we will be governed by the sunken, cynical man Mr. Obama really is. One can only hope that the senior journalists will be judged as harshly for their professional misconduct as Wall Street's leaders currently are for their failings.

Tony Blankley is a syndicated columnist.

Why Obama Will Lose

I found this op-ed piece very insightful. I offer it for you to read

David Deming
The Edmond Sun

EDMOND September 24, 2008 11:01 pm

— When Benjamin Franklin was dispatched to France as ambassador of the United States in 1776, he won the hearts of the French through his authenticity. Rather than take on an affected and phony continental style, Franklin eschewed the powdered wig of the European gentleman and donned the fur cap of an American frontiersman. Original genius and polymath, Franklin understood that the French would see through any false pretension but respect an authenticity that sprang from an unpretentious and naive love of country.

What a contrast there is between Franklin and Barack Obama. Obama is a Harvard lawyer who is a mile wide and an inch deep. He is only the latest in a long line of shallow elites that consider it stylish and intellectual to despise their own culture and heritage.

Nothing exemplifies Obama’s antipathy for American culture better than his statement that Americans “cling to” religion and guns out of frustration or bitterness. We only can suppose that Obama regards religion or firearms as aberrations that need to be eradicated.

Of course, both guns and religion are essential aspects of American culture. The United States was founded by people seeking religious freedom. Does the word “Pilgrim” ring a bell with anyone? Our freedom and the right to self-government were won by farmers with guns.

The American Revolution started when the British marched to Concord with the intention of confiscating colonial arms. Both the right to “keep and bear arms,” and the right to “free exercise” of religion are enshrined in the Bill of Rights. We have come a long way when the presidential nominee of a major political party regards the exercise of fundamental rights as a mental aberration.

When Obama refers to “my Muslim faith,” the verbal gaffe resonates as a Freudian slip because of Obama’s thinly veiled hatred for this country’s unique culture and institutions. Obama sat for 20 years in a church where the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr preached “goddamn America.” He only resigned from the congregation when it became politically expedient to do so. When earlier this year, Michelle Obama said “for the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country,” can we conclude that her husband disagrees? Is it not remarkable that Michelle Obama can be so small-minded as to find nothing in the history of the United States that merits her admiration but the personal success of her husband?

What is Barack Obama for? His campaign motto is “change.” But even a 6-year-old child understands that “change” can be either good or bad. Lacking specifics, the invocation of “change” as policy is completely empty. As we witness Obama’s minions mindlessly endorse the meaningless maxim of “change,” it only can call to mind the barnyard animals in George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” chanting “four legs good, two legs bad!”

The choice of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate has been devastating for the Obama campaign precisely because she is everything Obama is not. Palin is not ashamed of her culture or country. She is not embarrassed by being an American, but naively embraces her birthright. Unassisted by affirmative action, Palin has risen to national prominence on the basis of her character, intelligence and natural gifts. In a word, she has guts. This is a woman who is proud of her country, not because it has granted her personal success, but because she respects what America stands for: freedom, opportunity, and individualism.

Obama is a vapid demagogue, a hollow man that despises American culture. He is ill-suited to be president of the United States. As the weeks pass, more Americans will come to this realization and elect McCain/Palin in a landslide.

DAVID DEMING is an associate professor of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oklahoma, but his opinions do not necessarily represent those of the university.

What Time Is It?

Is it my age? Or is time really going by as fast as it seems? We are only three months away from saying goodbye to 2008.

This month promises to go down as one for the history books. The enormous financial crisis in the heart of our financial system has shaken our leaders and nation to our core. As I write this little note, our leaders of the Congress are attempting to devise a plan to bailout the banks and brokerage houses on Wall Street. They tell us we have to do this or else the entire financial system will collapse. Even then, there is no guarantee that this will fix the problem, even after they spend up to one trillion dollars of taxpayer money!

I have read numerous articles that this is the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression when the stock market crashed in 1929.

Why do I mention this to you? I urge you, first of all, to pray for our nation, our leaders and for the election of a new President, in a little over 30 days from now. Then I want to remind you that it is very critical for you to vote. If you are not registered, you still have time. Aside from that, I would lay in store extra food and other supplies where it is possible, since we could be in for some real tough times ahead.

These things all point to the soon coming of the Lord Jesus for His church! The most important preparation you can make is be ready for His coming.

As the Scripture reads "It is high-time to awake out of sleep and shake off the works of darkness..."

A Woman Of Faith for Vice-President?

I watched with interest, last night, (along with over 37 million others), the speech of Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska. She is the chosen candidate for Vice-President on the Republican ticket. After watching the main-stream media attempt to destroy her, even before she had a chance to be introduced to America, I was curious how this woman would do. She stunned the nation with a marvelous performance and confounded her critics, leaving them stammering for words to say. Her speech was intense, emotional and very moving. I had tears in my eyes several times as she spoke of her family, her country and her vision. I had felt that this woman was a Christian, but had not read anything of her faith, therefore, I was delighted to receive the following e-mail about her.

This is an excerpt from the Alaska Assembly of God newsletter:

"The opening night banquet of the 2008 Alaska District Council was honored to have Governor Sarah Palin address the delegates and guests. Governor Palin spoke of her appreciation for the Assemblies of God and requested that the Council pray for both her and the State of Alaska.

Superintendent Ted Boatsman, who was Palin's junior high pastor at Wasilla Assembly of God, along with Pastor Mike Rose of Juneau Christian Center, where Palin presently attends church when in Juneau, laid hands on the Governor and led the Council in prayer.

Palin, who was elected Governor in 2007, is Alaska's youngest governor and the first female governor of the state. She just recently gave birth to her fifth child, Trig. Palin spoke of the faith challenge she faced when learning that Trig would be a Downs Syndrome child. However, she and her husband, Todd, believe that every child is a gift of God, deserving of life, and that God was asking them to accept His will for their lives. The Alaska District Council believes that the State of Alaska is blessed to have a woman of faith and courage as Governor."

I encourage people of faith everywhere to hold our nation up in prayer. Pray for this Christian woman who has been nominated as the Republican Vice Presidential Candidate. Pray for God's protection on her and the others who are running for office. I know Satan is mad because we now have a "Pro-Life" ticket for President!

"A STORM IS COMING"

I followed with interest the development and progress of Hurricane Gustav as it formed down in the Caribbean and made its way up "Hurricane Alley" into the Gulf of Mexico. Even as I write this post, Gustav has moved inland and is pounding Baton Rouge. Mercifully, at this point, it seems New Orleans has been spared the terrible devastation that they suffered three years ago during Katrina. We watch and pray as our oldest son and his wife live in Alexandria, Louisiana, and will receive some wind and much rain as the storm moves northwest.

These moments bring back lots of memories from my growing up years in the Houston-Galveston, Texas area. I remember having to evacuate to shelters during numerous storms which are a natural part of the Gulf Coast. Milbre and I were married in September, 1960, and lived in Texas City, Texas, in September of 1961, when one of the worst storms to hit the Gulf Coast came ashore. It was Hurricane Carla. If you Google it, you will find many stories relating to the devastation of that storm. We had evacuated to my wife's home in De Ridder, LA., to wait for the storm to pass. It was at least a week before I was able to get back in to check on our property. We had damage from flooding, but the house was standing. Many others were not so fortunate. Block after block of devastation and despair are still vivid pictures in my mind of the power of nature. There were other storms over the years, But none greater than Carla.

Say a prayer today for those who are being affected by this storm.