Repentance in America--Part 4

America, along with the rest of the world, is destined to be set free from the power of Mystery Babylon. Even as they have already given up their national sovereignties to this world empire of Babylon, so also will they give up their national sovereignties to the Kingdom of God.

Insofar as America is concerned, to return to our Constitution would indeed be a good solution, but it would only solve the problem temporarily. Without a heart change in the people, the old problems would soon surface, and God would again bring us into captivity, just as He did with Israel in the time of the Judges. In my view, it is not possible to really obtain the permanent solution apart from fulfilling the feast of Tabernacles. The fulfillment of this feast day is designed to bring the first fruit company into perfection in order to qualify them for governing with the spiritual authority of the Kingdom of God.

Perhaps before this occurs, the world must run out of man-made solutions in which they have put their trust. Perhaps the counterfeit christs must run their course as they present their "solution" of love without the cross and the deification of man.

When the divine protection was removed from America on Sept. 11, 2001, the people howled for revenge, and President Bush said that God told him to go to war. (See my web log last week.) I do not doubt that God did indeed tell the President to go to war. But that does not make it morally right. The fact is, God intended to bring judgment upon America, so God told the President to go to war.

God did it for the same reason that God told David to number the people in 2 Samuel 24:1, which says,

"And again, the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and He moved David against them to say, 'Go number Israel and Judah'."

Did David hear the word of the Lord correctly? Yes, of course. But David did not understand God's underlying purpose in this. He had probably not added up the number of rest years and Jubilees that the people had refused to keep in its history in the land of Canaan. Israel owed God 62 rest years and 8 Jubilees, a total of 70 years in all.

But Israel and Judah were still under divine protection from the half shekel of silver given in the last census taken under Moses (Exodus 30:12-16). In order to remove that protection, God told David to number the people. He did so, and there is no record that he collected the half-shekel to continue their divine protection. Hence, we find 70,000 people dying in the plague--a thousand for each rest-year that the nation owed as a debt to sin.

Of course, the next time their time-debt came due (for the same reason as the first), God sent them into a Babylonian captivity for 70 years (2 Chron. 36:21). In that way, the land kept its sabbath-years and Jubilees, which the people had refused to keep. For a full discussion of this story, see Secrets of Time, chapter 7.

The point is this: Just because God tells a national leader to do something does not mean that God intends to bless the nation when he complies with the divine will. God often has deeper purposes that are hidden from us at the time. In America's case, God intended to bring judgment upon us. In that sense, the President did what was "right." In fact, the American people would have been quite angry with him if he had not gone to war, because the attack on the Twin Towers had evoked a spirit of revenge. And everyone was happy with the war as long as we seemed to be winning.

What most Americans did not foresee is that it is easier to get into a war than it is to get out of one. Likewise, it is easier to win pitched battles with a uniformed enemy than it is to fight with unknown gunmen among the population--especially when those gunmen believe that killing their own people can be quite useful in proving that the Americans cannot provide security for the population for which they are responsible.

God is proving to us that the solution to the problem is not military might. All the "horses of Egypt" that we own cannot protect us from divine judgment. Isaiah 31:1-3 makes this abundantly clear. It is in the same context as "the day of great slaughter when the towers fall" (Isaiah 30:25). The real solution is for US to repent, not to send the cavalry to bring vengeance upon those whom God raised up to judge us.

But what can one expect out of a humanist nation that has dethroned God? Presidents often call for national days of prayer, but nothing changes. They want God's blessing, but they do not want to retain God as the sovereign over America. We want God to bless our Babylonian undertakings, so that we may sin that grace may abound. Jeremiah 7:9-11 spells out the problem:

" (9) Will you steal, murder, and commit adultery, and swear falsely, and offer sacrifices to Baal, and walk after other gods that you have not known, (10) then come and stand before Me in this house, which is called by My name, and say, 'We are delivered [saved]'--that you may do all these abominations? (11) Has this house, which is called by My name, become a den of robbers in your sight?"

In Matt. 21:13 Jesus applied these words to the temple in His day. The priests certainly disagreed with Jesus, because they thought they were following the law scrupulously. They did not realize that the traditions of men had set aside the laws of God (Mark 7:9). The temple had become a "den of robbers." A robbers' den is a hide-out, where lawbreakers can feel safe while violating the law at will.

The Church afterward developed its own traditions of men to replace the law that they had cast aside. Just one obvious example of this is God's law on restitution found in Exodus 22:1-4. The Church cast aside that law and substituted the modern prison system instead. In fact, the prison system was supposed to be a more merciful alternative to the previous law wherein a person could be hanged for stealing a loaf of bread!

Because prisons did not deter crime, the Church demanded greater penalties. But the crime rate continues to rise, because the unjust sentences only serve to make more people bitter and angry. The taxpayers complain about the high cost of the prison system, but they are unwilling to conform to the more merciful biblical solution. We pay an enormous price for putting away God's law. But the Church knows almost nothing of God's alternate plan, and many Christians are actually AFRAID of God's law, thinking that if they advocated it, they would fall from grace!

Yes, I have had this reaction from Christians. They seem to think that being obedient to God's law would be a sin. I can find no place in the Bible where we are told that "sin is lawfulness." I find 1 John 3:4 telling us that "sin is lawlessness."

Much of the Church wants to pick and choose which laws to follow. For the most part, the Church advocates the laws it agrees with, and discards those it disagrees with. Christians demand that the nation outlaw "abortion rights," but they do not realize that they have aborted the Manchild for the past 70 generations. (See my booklet, The Prophetic Roots of Modern Abortion.) They do not realize that the world has only done physically what the Church has done spiritually. They do not realize that if the Church had done what was right in this regard, the world would have followed their example.

There are too many divine laws to list here. The overall problem is that we have cast aside the law and called it evil or irrelevant. The problem is anomia, "lawlessness" (Matt. 7:23). It is the heart-attitude of lawlessness, from which springs the humanistic demand for the "right" to sin.