“They Have Forsaken the LORD”

Ah sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a seed of evildoers, children that are corrupters: they have forsaken the LORD, they have provoked the Holy One of Israel unto anger, they are gone away backward. — Isaiah:1:4-7 [4] Ah sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a seed of evildoers, children that are corrupters: they have forsaken the LORD, they have provoked the Holy One of Israel unto anger, they are gone away backward. [5] Why should ye be stricken any more? ye will revolt more and more: the whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint. [6] From the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness in it; but wounds, and bruises, and putrifying sores: they have not been closed, neither bound up, neither mollified with ointment. [7] Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire: your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers.
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Most of us fail to grasp the depths of depravity into which the United States—and the world––are rapidly sinking, provoking a merciful and patient God to judgment. The evidence is overwhelming. Yet we’re blinded to the truth like the proverbial frog in the pot that is slowly, by small degrees, being brought to a boil. Deceit is everywhere, and lies pass for truth. The major promoter of abortion calls itself Planned Parenthood. By what perverted logic can a husband and wife who deliberately murdered in the womb what would have been their baby be called its “parents”? Shouldn’t the organization that inspired and assisted in this foul deed rather be called “Planned No Parenthood”?

Murder in the womb is cloaked under the innocuous label of “Pro-choice” while at the same time denying any choice to the victim. The “Campaign for Healthy Families” was the group that defeated a proposed ban on abortions in South Dakota. To what “healthy family” do aborted babies belong? In 2006, the National Abortion Federation complained that the Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act would “impose...burdens on teens seeking abortion” by requiring minors to get parental notification to cross state lines in order to get one!¹

And how do teens get into this predicament? By the immorality held up in a wicked society as a desirable sign of “maturity.” To brainwash teenagers with the lie that they can get away with anything that is their choice is evil. God no longer is allowed to have any opinion in the world He made! Our choice overrides His. America has “forsaken the Lord” and is sowing the seeds of its destruction. God cannot withhold His judgment without becoming a partner in our sins.

Between 1960 and 1990, out-of-wedlock births in the USA increased more than 500 percent (from 5.3 percent to 28 percent), single-parent families tripled, about 50 million babies were murdered in the womb, and violent crimes increased 500 percent. About 16,000 crimes occur on or around school campuses each day! In 2005, 37 percent of births were to unwed mothers, up from 36 percent in 2004 and 28 percent in 1990. The report stated that “The overall rise reflects the burgeoning number of people who are putting off marriage or are living together without getting married.” Are these the “Healthy Families” that the amoral campaign of that name is building by supporting abortion?

Homosexuals not only flaunt their sin in public, they are fêted, wooed, indulged, and thanked by politicians for their votes. It’s Sodom and Gomorrah again––or worse! In January 2007, Christian Vanneste, an MP in France’s ruling party was fined nearly $4,000 for saying that homosexuality is “inferior to heterosexuality” and would be “dangerous for humanity if it was pushed to the limit.” Of course, these are the facts. But daring to express the undeniable truth unleashes the wrath of police and courts in their zeal to protect the feelings of a favored class that complains of being offended.

Homosexuals and lesbians don’t procreate as God commanded mankind to do. The Creator’s very first commandment to Adam and Eve was, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth...” (Gn 1:28). “Gays” defy God’s very first words to mankind. They seek not children but pleasure, to the exclusion of all else. And in their self-absorbed folly, they taunt us with “gay pride.” Are they proud that their lifestyle is not only “dangerous” (it shortens the lifespan by 24 years²) but that it would abruptly end the human race if universally adopted? What madness supports this celebrated perversion?

Vanneste is appealing his case to the European Court of Human Rights, a likely exercise in futility. Truth used to be a sure defense in a lawsuit. Today truth is irrelevant: the issue is whether a “protected minority” or a special interest group feels offended. Vladimir Bukovsky, a former Soviet dissident, warned that “the EU’s enforcement of political correctness was a symbol of the Union’s slide toward a similar [Soviet-like] oppressive regime.”

On October 10, 2004, in Philadelphia, eleven evangelical Christians were arrested and jailed for peacefully witnessing for Christ at a “gay parade”—four of them for quoting Bible verses while walking a public sidewalk. In Germany, a priest faces jail for publicly criticizing abortionists, and in Holland, ‘fornicators’ and ‘adulterers’ are protected classes and cannot be criticized.”³

On October 6, 2006, LifeSiteNews reported, “The gloves have come off; the Parliamentary debate in Canada has moved beyond homosexual ‘marriage’ and on to refusing freedoms for those with religious beliefs opposed to homosexuality and those with conscientious reasons for opposing it.”⁴ Hundreds of other examples of “political correctness” gone berserk in defense of immorality throughout the Western world could be cited, space permitting.

What is happening today reflects a long history. Visiting Holland, Germany, France, and England, countries where the Protestant Reformation challenged Roman Catholicism, which had held the entire Western world in its iron grip for centuries, is inspiring but at the same time disheartening. It is thrilling to visit the Wittenberg Castle Church, where the Reformation began. It held one of Europe’s largest collections of religious relics—some 19,000 accumulated by Frederick III. Pilgrims viewing all of them would receive indulgences that would allegedly shorten their time in purgatory by 5,209 years⁵—the largest reduction obtainable in one place outside of Rome.

Of course, these poor souls never suspected that on January 1, 1967, over the signature of Pope Paul VI, their infallible Church would issue its “Apostolic Constitution on the Revision of Indulgences,” admitting centuries of false promises, undoing the reduction of the purgatorial sufferings deceased Catholics thought they had purchased, and making new requirements they couldn’t possibly fulfill, having been dead and presumably still in purgatory after 400 years of torment in its flames.⁶

This was the madness that ruled the Middle Ages. There were tiny vials of “true milk from the Virgin Mary’s breasts,” pickled fingers and toes of this or that “saint,” and enough pieces of wood in Europe venerated as parts of the “true cross” to build a cathedral. Even toenails of “saints” were worshiped by the deluded devout. Peter’s toes were uncommonly prolific. There were enough “certified trimmings” in Europe’s cathedrals to fill a gunnysack. The biggest scam was selling “indulgences” to release deceased relatives from purgatory—and who would refuse to buy Aunt Maria’s release from the flames! From such blood money, St. Peter’s Basilica was repaired and expanded to its present form.

No matter how well one knows the story, it is always an emotional experience to stand at the Wittenberg door. There, on October 31, 1517, Martin Luther nailed his Disputation of the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences, known as the 95 Theses. By 1518, copies in other languages had been read throughout Europe, arousing rage against the Roman Catholic Church. Luther’s brave challenge at the risk of his life shook the church and world of his day. Oh, that it would happen again—not just to Catholicism (which hasn’t changed), but to Protestantism as well!

Visiting those areas of Europe and remembering the impact of Luther’s simple paper is deeply moving—but at the same time discouraging. Everywhere, one sees the ruins that the Reformation has left in its wake: apostate state churches scarcely attended, mostly dead and a reproach to Christ instead of the centers for proclaiming the gospel they once were. “Christian” Europe has assuredly forsaken the Lord and is beginning to reap in earnest the fruit of the rebellion it has been sowing for a long, long time.

The liberalism of England’s universities, media, and courts undermined any sense of God-given morality that had barely survived from the days of Luther and Calvin. “Multiculturalism” is the new faith—a multiculturism that embraces every religion and creed. There is, however, one exception: the culture of the host country, England. Why? Because it is Western and has a Christian heritage. That, above all, is not acceptable. Islam most assuredly is in, and Christianity is out.

In fact, it was the rejection of Christianity that opened Britain to the amoral liberalism prevalent in its courts, media, and universities that now favors Muhammad over Christ and is sowing the seeds of its own destruction.

The most disheartening—even frightening—experience each time one returns to Britain and Europe is to see firsthand the evidence of the “new reformation” sweeping those countries and the world today. A fresh Islamic invasion (already far more effective than the military invasion that was turned back at Poitier-Tours in 732 and Vienna in the 18th century) is changing the face of England, France, Holland, Germany, and the other countries that supported the first Reformation. The new privileged “minority” are the Muslim immigrants, many of whom have come in obedience to Muhammad’s command (which all Muslims everywhere are obligated to obey in the name of Allah and Islam) to take over the entire world by violence, if necessary. They mostly refuse to be integrated into the societies they invade, retaining their own customs and language, while demanding “rights” (including welfare support of multiple wives) from the country they intend to destroy. The protection of the West’s liberal laws assists terrorists in the commanded takeover. Imam Abu Baseer, a leading religious supporter of al-Qaeda, confessed:

One of the goals of immigration is the revival of the duty of jihad and enforcement of their power over the infidels. Immigration and jihad go together.⁷

Christianity and Christ may be mocked in the West, but no word must be whispered (for fear of violent reprisals) against Islam. One city in England is already 75 percent Muslim and has a Muslim mayor. Non-Muslims move out, property values plummet, allowing more Muslims to move in at bargain prices. Islamists boast that they will eventually have a string of Muslims-only cities in a crescent shape stretching across the heartland of England. They insist that this “crescent” will be ruled by sharia (Islamic law), as in Saudi Arabia, where women are publically stoned to death (if the family doesn’t kill them first) for “allowing” themselves to be raped; no non-Muslim place of worship may be built; those who convert from Islam to any other religion are beheaded; and Islamic law rules an Islamic state. This is Islam’s intent for the entire world.

The cost of opposing Islam or Muhammad far exceeds the judgments decreed by liberal courts against anti-abortionists or anti-gays—a cost that has already mounted into thousands of lives and billions of dollars. We’ve seen it in murder, mayhem, and destruction through riots in Paris, trains blown up in Madrid, subways and buses exploding in London, planes flown into the Twin Towers in New York, and Shiites and Sunnis slaughtering one another with a ferocity and cruelty that proclaims to the world—if the world were not afraid to listen—that Islam is not a religion of peace. Yet, in spite of such overwhelming evidence, the same old political correctness insists that all of this horror is in the cause of “peace” because Islam is peace—and woe to anyone who dares to correct that lie!

Incredibly, after 9/11 and again after the London bombings of 2005, government instructions were for police “to avoid doing anything to alienate Britain’s Muslims.” As a practical matter, “this meant the police had to deny the nature of Islamist terrorism altogether.”⁸

“This was why, on the day that four Islamist suicide bombers blew themselves and more than fifty London commuters to bits, the Met’s deputy assistant commissioner, Brian Paddick, stood before the television cameras and made the noteworthy comment: ‘As far as I am concerned, Islam and terrorists are two words that do not go together.’”⁹ Such whitewashing of Islam by high officials has become the scandal of the century. As Melanie Phillips, author of Londonistan, so perceptively points out:

Britain is in Denial. Having allowed the country to turn into a global hub of the Islamic jihad...the British establishment is still failing...to acknowledge what it is actually facing and take the appropriate action. Instead, it is deep into a policy of appeasement of the phenomenon that threatens it...in a panic-stricken attempt to curry favor and buy off the chances of any further attacks....¹⁰

Though they knew that London had become a headquarters for Islamic terrorism worldwide, the British police “even after 9/11...still took no action against Islamist extremists embedded in London....” The willful blindness to indisputable facts was incredible.

“Over the years, the governments of India, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Israel, France, Algeria, Peru, Yemen, and Russia, among others, lodged...protests about the presence in Britain of terrorist organizations or their sympathizers....Egypt denounced Britain as a hotbed for radicals....¹¹

The reason for this insanity was in the multiculturism (every culture and religion is equally good—except for Christianity, which must be jettisoned because of its narrow-minded claim that Jesus Christ is the only way to God). In a word, British society has lost its moral foundation, as Phillips explains:

The underlying message in the classroom is that there is no historical truth at all, and whatever had happened in the past [including the crucifixion of Christ for our sins and His resurrection] was only a matter of opinion....At the heart of this unpicking of national identity lies a repudiation of Christianity, the founding faith of the nation and the fundamental source of its values, including its...profound love of liberty....For the secular elite, Britain is now a “post-Christian society; and insofar as this is not yet the case, this elite is determined to make it so. Under the rubric of multiculturalism and promoting “diversity,” local authorities and government bodies are systematically bullying Christianity out of existence....¹²

Whether in the world or the church, we see much the same thing happening in America. Anything is acceptable—except biblical Christianity. Public schools accommodate witches, homosexuals, and Muslims promoting their beliefs and practices. But Christianity, in the name of freedom, is outlawed. Let us not give up the fight for biblical truth, earnestly contending for the faith, once for all delivered to the saints. TBC

Endnotes

1. http://www.prochoice.org/policy/policyreports/legislative_2006.html.
2. http://www.earnedmedia.org/frereport.htm.
3. http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=54260.
4. http://ca.altermedia.info/news/general/page/2/.
5. Martin Treu, Martin Luther in Wittenberg: A Biographical Tour (Wittenberg:Saxon-Anhal to Luther Memorial Foundation, 2003), 15.
6. Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents, General Editor Austin Flannery, O.P. (Northport, NY: Costello Publishing Company, 1988, Revised Edition), Volume I, 62-79.
7. Stephen Ulph, “Londonistan,” Terrorism Monitor, (Jamestown Center), vol. 2, no. 4 (26 Feb 2004).
8. Melanie Phillips, Londonistan (New York: Encounter Books, 2006), 33.
9. Mansoor Ijaz, Financial Times, July 11, 2005.
10. Phillips, Londonistan, 182-84.
11. Ibid., 36-41.
12. Ibid., 64-69.