Blessings and Curses, Actions and Consequences

We have a plan and a timetable that he is working through, and that this is not the time for all of mankind to be saved. For most human beings, that time will come in the period of the white throne judgment, at least a thousand years from now in the future. But another part of our unique understanding of Cropsey is our knowing who the modern-day descendants of ancient Israel are. That they are generally concentrated in the English-speaking nations that are descended from the British Empire, the English-speaking nations of the Western world.

And this is not a sermon to go into the evidence for that. We have a study guide on that, the United States and Britain and Bible prophecy, and we have a lot of material on our website and sermons and classes and so on on that subject. So this is not the purpose of today's sermon to go into that. However, there is one particular aspect of that topic that I do want to focus on. And the fact is, you cannot make sense of what is going on in the world today without knowing the prophetic identity of the key players.

And the United States is, at the moment, the world's lone superpower. And I say, at the moment, because there is coming a time when the United States will no longer be the world's only superpower. Another superpower is coming. And the Bible does discuss a number of relatively minor players on the world scene at the end time, such as Egypt and Libya and the Kingdom of Jordan.

But does it make sense to leave out the world's greatest superpower at the time of the end and prophecy? And at the same time, the Bible does contain many end time prophecies of what is called Israel. But Israel today, the nation we know of, is a tiny nation about the size of New Jersey, has a population of a little under 9 million people.

That's only about half, again, the size of the population of our state of Colorado here. And these are some of the reasons why we believe that prophecies in the Bible about end time Israel are talking about the national descendants of ancient Israel and not just today's tiny state of Israel there in the Middle East. And among the Bible prophecies about Israel and the end time are some that are good, but many that are not so good. God made promises of national greatness to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and Joseph that were unconditional. God says, I will fulfill these promises to you.

But those promises were never fulfilled, many of them, in biblical times. You can check the scriptures and see that. God said he would fulfill those promises, but he didn't specify exactly when, other than some cases, though he promised those would be fulfilled near the time of the end. And because of what has been taking place in our nation recently, I've been over a number of months now rereading and thinking about and meditating on some of those prophecies.

And with what has taken place in our nation in the last two weeks in particular, and that is continuing right now, I thought today would be a good time to review some of those prophecies. Because they tell us what is taking place in our nation, and they tell us why those things are taking place, and they tell us where they are leading our nation and what we can ultimately expect in the future.

Earlier this week, as I was proofreading the latest issue of Beyond Today before it went to the printer here, I was proofreading an article by Darris McDaily in this issue, and there was a particular sentence in there that Darris had written that really struck me. Darris wrote that he had been a student of Bible prophecy long enough to realize that there are times in history when the flow of Bible prophecy slows down, and there are times in history when that flow of Bible prophecy speeds up.

And he wrote that it's his perception that now we are living in a time when that flow of Bible prophecy is speeding up. And he wrote this well before the events of the last two weeks. He was actually talking about coronavirus, the coronavirus epidemic, pandemic and its impact on the nation and on the world. But after the last two weeks, I would certainly have to agree with Darris. I do think that things are speeding up, or at the very least, we are getting a foretaste of things to come.

Coronavirus was one thing, but now I think we're beginning to see a foretaste of the future of the country. And all we're seeing is a foretaste of what I would term death by national suicide. It's a serious subject. It's serious what is taking place in our nation. And today I want to go through some prophecies that tell us why this is happening.

And what we can expect in the future. Today I want to cover one long prophecy that is an overview of the story of ancient Israel, both the good and the bad, because prophecy is often dual or has dual fulfillments. More than one fulfillment. And it's also an overview because it is dual. It's also an overview of the story of the modern day descendants of Israel as well. And that long prophecy is found in Deuteronomy chapter 28. And most of us probably remember that as one of the blessings and cursings chapters. Deuteronomy 28 and Leviticus 26. We don't have time to go through Leviticus 26, but they very much overlap and say essentially the same things. But let's go through that chapter and see what it says. We call it the blessings and curses chapter, but I have another slightly different take on it. But it's also a chapter of actions and consequences. Actions and consequences.

By that, I mean many of God's laws are self-enforcing, meaning that if we break those laws, there are consequences that will be paid. Jeremiah 2 and verse 19 tells us, your own wickedness will correct you and your backslidings will reprove you. And what this tells us is that flaunting God's laws in any number of aspects of life bring consequences. They bring their own correction. For example, disobeying God's laws regarding marriage and sexual relationships and so on has brought on our nation and on the world crippling and devastating epidemics of things such as AIDS, very deadly disease, other sexually transmissible diseases of all kinds, as well as other consequences such as fatherless homes and the resulting increases in crime and poverty and child abuse and substance abuse of all kinds. And we also can't ignore the fact that a drop in the moral standards of a nation weakens the very fabric of the nation throughout every aspect of society. And if that moral slide is not reversed, it weakens the entire nation in every way and makes a nation more of a tempting target for takeover by military attack, by conquest and so on. It's how empires rise and fall, who rise and fall and are invaded and conquered and enslaved and that sort of thing. And this has happened repeatedly throughout history. So whenever we're tempted to think that God's laws don't apply to us as individually or as a nation or think that they're no longer in force, we should consider the blessings that come from those laws, which we'll cover in just a minute here, and the possible unforeseen consequences of violating those laws. And this is certainly part of the warning that is inherent in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28. So this chapter we'll be reading today, Deuteronomy 28. It's given near the end of the book of Deuteronomy. And what is the overall context of the book of Deuteronomy? It's the last of the five books of Moses, and it was written and completed and given to Israel by Moses shortly before they crossed over the River Jordan to inherit the Promised Land and to begin the nation in the land that God had promised to them. So in this long chapter, and the parallel in Leviticus 26, God describes in great detail what would happen to the nation of Israel if they obeyed his instructions, which had been given previously in the previous five books of Moses, as well as earlier in the book of Deuteronomy. What would happen if they obeyed him and the blessings that would flow from that? And also what would happen if they disobeyed him? And it begins in verses 2 through 14 with these specific blessings that would come on the nation if they obeyed God and did what was right in his sight. So let's read about those. Today I'm going to read from the New Living Translation, which I think makes this a bit more clear. So beginning in Deuteronomy 28 in verse 1, if you fully obey the Lord your God and carefully keep all his commands that I am giving you today this is Moses writing this, that I am giving you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations of the world. You will experience all these blessings if you obey the Lord your God. Your towns and your fields will be blessed. Your children and your crops will be blessed.

The offspring of your herds and flocks will be blessed. Your fruit baskets and bread boards will be blessed. What are bread boards? It's what we would call a kneading board for bread today, meaning they're going to have plenty of grain and barley and wheat for producing bread, which was the most common food item for people of that day. It continues in verse 6, wherever you go and whatever you do, you will be blessed. The Lord will conquer your enemies when they attack you. They will attack you from one direction, but they will scatter from you in seven. In other words, their enemies would be defeated and flee in every direction and chaos and confusion because God is blessing and protecting his people. Verse 8, the Lord will guarantee a blessing on everything you do and will fill your storehouses with grain. The Lord your God will bless you in the land he is giving you. If you obey the commands of the Lord your God and walk in his ways, the Lord will establish you as his holy people, as he swore he would do. Then all the nations of the world will see that you are people claimed by the Lord and they will stand in awe of you.

And as I've covered in messages before, why did God place Israel there at the crossroads of the world? He placed him there at the intersection of three continents, Asia and Europe and Africa, so that all the nations could see their positive example and be inspired to follow them and see the blessings they were experiencing and be inspired to obey God and to choose God's way of life also.

But as we'll see, that did not turn out so well. Continuing with God's promises, verse 11, The Lord will give you prosperity in the land he swore to your ancestors to give you, blessing you with many children, numerous livestock, and abundant crops.

The Lord will sin reign at the proper time from his rich treasury in the heavens and will bless all the work you do. You will lend to many nations, but you will never need to borrow from them because of their great blessings. They would have so much that they could loan and lend to other nations there, so other nations would be blessed by them. In verse 13, if you listen to these commands of the Lord your God that I am giving you today, and if you carefully obey them, the Lord will make you the head and not the tail, and you will always be on top and never at the bottom. And finally, you must not turn away from any of the commands I am giving you today, nor follow after other gods and worship them. And we know from history that some of these prophecies were fulfilled in ancient Israel during the times that they did as a people obey God. We know, for instance, during the period of the kingdom of King David and later his son Solomon, that God did bless them greatly. And there David, he gave them great military conquests over the hostile nations around them. And the kingdom did expand, as we see here from the small original lands that they settled in and became quite a sizable and powerful kingdom during that time. I might mention also that historically during this time, the other nearby empires such as Egypt down to the south, Babylon, Syria, the Hittites, and so on, they were weakened or non-existent at that time. So God gave Israel this window, a vacuum there in which they were the most powerful kingdom in that part of the world. And they did become a powerful nation. And it would have remained that way had Israel chosen to continue in obedience to God. But we know the story. We know that Solomon, because of his many wives and concubines, they turned his heart from God to idolatry and worshiping other gods.

And at his death, the kingdom of Israel split into separate kingdoms of Israel and Judah.

And it took several centuries, but Deuteronomy tells us what would happen. They lost their status of being blessed by God. They rotted out and decayed from within because of their disobedience, because of their moral corruption, which is described throughout the books of the prophets and the minor prophets there. And finally, they were taken away into captivity and destroyed as nations. And the 12 tribes of Israel were scattered and at that point lost to history.

And that's why I term this a self-inflicted national suicide. They killed their own nations. They killed their own peoples. And that's why I use this term. It's a sobering term, but I mean it in every sense of the word. Now let's talk about those blessings that we just read about and apply them to the United States. We'll skip over Britain. It's a similar story, but we don't have time to cover all of that, or the stories of Canada and Australia and New Zealand and South Africa, other nations descended from Israel. So we'll just focus on the United States for lack of time. How did the United States start? It started as the original, well, originally there weren't 13. There was originally the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts up here near Kecod. And they slowly grew and spread out along the eastern seaboard here. And then after gaining independence there in 1776, they gained independence miraculously from the world superpower of the day, which was the the British Empire, and then spread, expanded across the the entire continent all the way to the west coast. And this is a map from our booklet on the United States and Britain and prophecy, and Bible prophecy showing the huge swathes of land that the United States was blessed with as God over the course of two centuries, fulfilled the great blessings that he had promised to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. And this map graphically illustrates that, how we were given some of the most blessed lands in the entire earth. Incredibly fertile heartland here, agricultural lands, a lot of lands with very valuable minerals, as we have here in the Rocky Mountains, very fertile agricultural territory along the west coast, and again a lot of land very wealthy in minerals. And this is not even depicting Alaska and Hawaii as well, the tremendous amount of national wealth that we were miraculously blessed with with those land. So we see the blessings of agricultural fertility and great croplands and beautiful weather. We live in a temperate zone of the world that is blessed with some of the best weather anywhere in the world here. And we became a national superpower at the end of World War II. And then more recent decades had become the world's only superpower with the collapse of the Soviet Union here several decades ago. And these nations, the United States, British Empire, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, we didn't become great because of anything inherent with us as a people. We became great because of God's blessings, because of God's promises to his faithful patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. And we have been greatly blessed as a people here, a people who, for the most part, not always certainly, not perfectly certainly, but a people who, fairly unique among all the peoples of the world, did believe the Bible and did establish their laws and governance based on what they read in the scriptures and trying to obey it.

And as a result of that, these great blessings that we have read about here in the first 14 verses of this chapter were fulfilled. And as God promised here, two verses that we just read, verse 10, and all the nations of the world will see that you are a people claimed by the Lord, and they will stand in awe of you. Skipping to verse 13, if you listen to these commands of the Lord your God that I am giving you today, and if you carefully obey them, the Lord will make you the head and not the tail, and you will always be on top and never at the bottom. And again, this has been the incredibly blessed position of the nations of the British Empire for several centuries, and for the United States. Since, again, since the end of World War II, we have been the greatest nations of the world. Unfortunately, the time of dominance of the British Empire has passed. They were followed by us, the American Empire, you might say. And now, what is happening to us? And where are we going? Well, the prophetic story here, spelled out in this chapter, continues.

Let's pick up the story now in verse 15. And God's warnings of what would happen.

But if you refuse to listen to the Lord your God and do not obey all the commands and decrees I am giving you today, all these curses will come and overwhelm you. Your towns and your fields will be cursed. Your fruit baskets and breadboards will be cursed. Your children and your crops will be cursed. The offspring of your herds and flocks will be cursed. He's taking the same phrases from the blessings and flipping them on their head. Whereas before, they would be blessed. Now, they will all be cursed. It's interesting just to interject at this point.

For decades, the United States was a net exporter of food. But that changed in 2005, just 15 years ago. For decades, we exported food all over the world. Weeds and corn and grain and beef and all of this. But now, since 2005, we have been a net importer of food, meaning that we consume more food than we produce and export. We export a lot of corn and wheat. We are a net exporter of those. But we import more of nearly everything else. We, to be blunt, no longer produce enough food to feed ourselves, which is really astonishing considering our national history and the incredible productivity of our agricultural lands here. We should be able to do that, and we did for several centuries, but we simply cannot produce enough food to feed ourselves any longer. Our fields, as it says here, in other words, our agricultural productivity is being cursed. Many reasons, a combination of different reasons, don't have time to go into all of that. But it's a fact. It is a dramatic change that has come on our nation in just the last 15 years. Continuing now, verse 19, wherever you go and whatever you do, you will be cursed. The Lord himself will send on you curses, confusion, and frustration in everything you do until at last you are completely destroyed for doing evil and abandoning me. Question for you. Are we seeing any curses, confusion, and frustration in our nation today? Seen any of that in the last two weeks?

We're seeing our nation ripped apart. For what? For what? For, and you won't see this reported in the media, George Floyd was a career criminal. He had spent four or five stints in prison.

It's a little bit unclear. The records, he hasn't been able to find all the records where he spent four stints or five stints in prison. Separate stints. Was convicted of multiple crimes, mostly involving drug possession with intent to distribute, which is a fancy way of selling drugs, saying selling drugs. He was also in his most serious crime for which he was in prison for five years. He and a gang of other men broke into a woman's home. The woman was pregnant. George Floyd stuck a loaded pistol at her abdomen and threatened to kill her unless she told him and his accomplices where drugs and money were in the house.

He went off to search for drugs and money and one of his accomplices pistol whipped the pregnant woman. As a result of this, he was caught, convicted, and spent five years in prison for this.

He was not the gentle giant saintly person that he is described as being here.

He got killed in the act of passing that counterfeit $20 bill, had purchased some cigarettes, paid for them with what was obviously a counterfeit bill. The clerk said, hey, this is a counterfeit bill. Give back the cigarettes you just purchased. He refused to do so. The clerk called the police and we know the rest of the story. He also happened to have in the autopsy, two autopsies show that he had methamphetamine and fentanyl and at least two other drugs in his system when he died. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying he deserved to die. What happened to him was criminal and the police officer or officers involved should have been fired and should go to prison. So don't mistake what I'm saying here. What they did was clearly criminal there. But the fact is, most of us have studied and read our Bibles long enough to know that if you do enough stupid things, eventually it's going to catch up with you. And he also had underlying health issues, which were mentioned in the autopsy report, that could have contributed to his death and caused his death. As a matter of fact, the original autopsy did say his cause of death was underlying health issues, not the actions that were done to him by the police.

So in any normal world, his career choices have consequences. There are career choice hazards. He chose a career of being a criminal, and he suffered the consequences of that. If you choose a career as a criminal, you can't expect to live a long and happy and healthy life. It's the facts of life. Most of us have lived long enough to understand that simple truth.

And yet we have an entire nation that has drawn absolutely crazy over the death of this man who is a thug. He also fathered five children out of wedlock and abandoned them for others to raise.

And because of his death, the nation went insane in an orgy of violence and destruction, in which more than 20 people had died already, including at least four Black law enforcement officers. And I don't even like mentioning the factor of race, because biblically there is one race, and that is the human race. We are all made in God's image, in God's lightness, for God's plan and purpose of bringing all of us into the kingdom and the family of God. So there is no place for racism anywhere in God's plan and his purpose. You may be absolutely clear about that.

However, I want to be also very clear that we have been cursed at this time with a spirit of absolute confusion and chaos and destruction and frustration, exactly, as was foretold, as we just read there in Deuteronomy 28, to the point that people, many people, hundreds, thousands, millions of people, as well as political leaders, are calling for getting rid of the police, of defunding police, police departments, getting rid of the only force that is standing between the American people and absolute anarchy and keeping people safe. And all of this makes absolutely no sense at all. And I've said a number of times before in sermons, when you see things that make absolutely no sense on a physical level, you can be pretty sure that something is taking place on a spiritual level. And are we ever seeing that right now in the forces that are ricking apart our nation for no good reason? No good reason whatsoever.

Continuing here in Deuteronomy 28, we just read this, the Lord himself will sin on you curses, confusion, and frustration in everything you do until at last you are completely destroyed for doing evil and abandoning you. Would a God-fearing people do what is taking place in the nation right now? Of course not. It is absolute insanity. It is national suicide.

Next verse 21, the Lord will afflict you with diseases until none of you are left in the land you are about to enter and occupy. I want to share with you a few statistics here that I looked up.

This is from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Six in ten adults in the United States have a chronic disease. It's more than half. 60 percent. Six in ten have a chronic disease. Four in ten adults have two or more chronic diseases.

Our annual US health care costs total of three and a half trillion dollars.

That's approximately ten thousand dollars per person per year. Ten thousand dollars per person per year.

Contributing to this are a lot of our national habits. Smoking. Poor nutrition. Poor diet, in other words. Lack of exercise. Simply not moving. Excessive alcohol use. In other words, much of this is self-inflicted. And again, what did God say? The Lord will afflict you with diseases until none of you are left in the land you are about to enter and occupy. And we see that brought out in these statistics. Quite shocking. Continuing with other mention of diseases here, the Lord will strike you with wasting diseases, fever, and inflammation, and with scorching heat and drought, and with blight and mildew. These disasters will pursue you until you die.

The skies above will be as unyielding as bronze, and the earth beneath will be as hard as iron. The Lord will change the rain that falls on your land into powder, and dust will pour down from the sky until you are destroyed. And this is obviously talking about drought. And we're familiar with that. We live in Colorado. It is a high desert climate. We get about 14-15 inches of moisture a year here. So we're familiar with drought. Parts of the state are nearly always in drought at some point or another year. We know that, but try as we might, we cannot control the weather. But God can control the weather, and He does control the weather.

And when, because of our defiance toward Him and our rejection of Him and His way of life, when He reaches the end of His patience and decides to withdraw the blessing of rain and due season and good weather, we just read about the results. There's nothing to eat. There are no crops. There is no grain. There is no corn. There is no beef. There is no cattle. No chickens. No turkey. Nothing on the shelves of the supermarket. Continuing on, verse 25, The Lord will cause you to be defeated by your enemies. You will attack your enemies from one direction, but you will scatter from them in seven. Again, exact reverse what he promised earlier. You will be an object of horror to all the kingdoms of the earth. Your corpses will be food for all the scavenging birds and wild animals, and no one will be there to chase them away.

Little history lesson here about us being defeated by our enemies. What was the last war that the United States won? So, to give you a little bit of a clue, it was World War II.

75 years ago, 75 years ago, it was the last war that we won.

World War II was followed by Korea. Did we win the Korean War? No, we didn't. We called a truce an armistice. There was an armistice line that was drawn there between North and South Korea.

Since then, for the last 65 years, we have kept tens of thousands of troops there to keep the peace. Essentially, same thing in Germany. In Germany, it ended 75 years ago in Europe last month.

When Germany declared Germany surrendered. But we have kept troops there ever since for 75 years. And same thing in Korea for the last 65 years. Round numbers to keep the peace.

How many billions upon billions of dollars is that cost our national treasury? Because we didn't win the war. What happened in Vietnam? In the 60s and 70s.

Again, Vietnam, we were defeated by an insurgency, chose to declare victory and withdraw and turn it over to the South Vietnamese. And we went home. After which, Vietnam and Cambodia fell to the communists and became the killing fields in which hundreds of thousands of innocent people were killed by communism. And what's happening today? There are thousands upon thousands of students demanding socialism and communism. They're abysmally ignorant of the history, the bloody history of socialism and communism. After that, what happened? We had the first Iraq war, which we won. No question about it. We defeated Saddam Hussein. This was after he had invaded Kuwait.

But we didn't finish the job. So we left Saddam Hussein in place. And then what happened? We had to come back years later and re-invade Iraq. And after almost 20 years of bloodshed and lost troops and equipment and the expenditure of, again, billions of dollars, what do we have to show for it? They kicked us out, told us they don't want us there anymore. And now we're seeing the same thing in Afghanistan, which we invaded again nearly 20 years ago, and have spent, again, countless billions of dollars trying to pacify a country that is un-pacifiable. And now we're negotiating to declare victory and pull out and go home and leave it in the hands of the Taliban. All of these wars have brought no conclusive victories for the last 75 years since World War II. World War II was a conclusive victory there. But all of our wars since then have not been. And they have cost us literally trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives killed, and many more wounded and injured and changed for the worse for life.

God gave another promise in Leviticus 26. This is the parallel chapter, but talking about our military. He's, God foretold, Leviticus 26, verse 19, I will break the pride of your power because of our sins. We have had the world's biggest and most powerful military by far for the last 75 years since World War II. But we won't use that power. So we let far lesser powers pick away at our power through insurgencies and political maneuvering and so on, so that they slowly defeat us through wars of attrition until we simply give up and go home. As has happened in these other wars that I mentioned here. Continuing, going back here, again, your corpses will be food for all the scavenging birds and wild animals, and no one will be there to chase them away.

Eventually, this is what is going to happen to our military, the strongest in the world.

Verse 27, the Lord will afflict you with the boils of Egypt and with tumors, scurvy, and the itch from which you cannot be cured. The Lord will strike you with madness, blindness, and panic. Madness, blindness, and panic.

We looked up some other statistics here. This is from the website mentalhealthfirstaid.org.

In the United States, almost half of adults, 46.4%, will experience a mental illness during their lifetime. Think about that. Nearly half of adults will experience a mental illness during their lifetime. Five percent of adults, those 18 or older, experience a mental illness in any one year.

Equivalent to nearly 44 million people in a given year.

Of adults in the United States with any mental disorder over a one-year period, 14.4% have one disorder, 5.8%, nearly 6%, have two disorders, and 6% have three or more. Again, let's notice what we, well, another statistic here, two other statistics.

Half of all mental disorders begin by age 14 and three-quarters by age 24. So we're not talking about the old crazy people. No, we're talking about young people, teenage years. Half of all mental disorders begin by age 14 and three-quarters by age 24, which means they are dealing with a lifetime of this. In the United States, only 41% of the people who had a mental disorder in the past year received professional health care or other services.

And another truly, truly shocking statistic from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about one in six children age 3 to 17 were diagnosed with a developmental disability, as reported by parents during a study period of 2009 to 2017. These included autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and cerebral palsy, among others. So, nearly one in six children. So, again, to reread what God said here, the Lord will strike you with madness, blindness, and panic. Mental disorders, in other words.

Continuing, you will gulp around in broad daylight like a blind person, groping in the darkness, but you will not find your way. You will be oppressed and robbed continually, and no one will come to save you. You will be engaged to a woman, but another man will sleep with her. You will build a house, but someone else will live in it. You will plant a vineyard, but you will never enjoy its fruit. In other words, people will work for things all their lives, but they won't be able to enjoy the fruit of their labor. Or, again, we could talk about many possibilities as to how that would be fulfilled, but I don't have time for all of that.

Sorry, I lost my place here. Skip down too many. Verse 31, your ox will be butchered before your eyes, but you will not eat a single bite of the meat. Your donkey will be taken from you, never to be returned. Your sheep and goats will be given to your enemies, and no one will be there to help you. You will watch as your sons and daughters are taken away as slaves. Your heart will break for them, but you won't be able to help them. A foreign nation you have never heard about will eat the crops you worked so hard to grow. You will suffer under constant oppression and harsh treatment. You will go mad because of all the tragedy you see around you. The Lord will cover your knees and legs with interrable boils. In fact, you will be covered from head to foot.

The Lord will exile you and your king to a nation unknown to you and your ancestors. There in exile, you will worship gods of wood and stone. You will become an object of horror, ridicule, and mockery among all the nations to which the Lord sends you. You will plant much, but harvest little, for locusts will eat your crops. You will plant vineyards and care for them, but you will not drink the wine or eat the grapes, for worms will destroy the vines. You will grow olive trees throughout your land, but you will never use the olive oil for the fruit you will drop before it ripens. You will have sons and daughters, but you will lose them, for they will be led away into captivity. Swarms of insects will destroy their trees and crops.

The foreigners living among you will become stronger and stronger while you become weaker and weaker. They will lend money to you, but you will not lend to them. They will be the head, and you will be the tail.

A little bit of statistics here for you. During the eight years of the previous presidential administration, we added as much national debt in that eight years as we had for the previous more than 200 years of our nation's history since 1776.

Since then, we've added another 20 percent to the national debt, mostly in the last few months in dealing with the coronavirus fallout and the impact on our nation's economy there.

Our current national debt is about $25 trillion.

That's about $75,000 for every man, woman, and child currently living in the United States.

$75,000. The last time we had a trade surplus, national trade surplus, was 45 years ago, 1975. 1975. For the last 45 years, we have imported more goods and services than we have exported. So we have had 45 years of deficits, and sooner or later that catches up.

We're starting to see the impact of that.

Continuing, verse 47, if you do not serve the Lord your God with joy and enthusiasm for the abundant benefits you have received, you will serve your enemies whom the Lord will send against you.

I'm reminded here of a Bob Dylan song. I'm not necessarily a Bob Dylan fan, but he did a song a decade or two ago called, You Gotta Serve Somebody. You gotta serve somebody, and that was the refrain of the song. You gotta serve somebody. And his point was, everybody is serving someone. The question is, who is it that you're serving?

And God makes that point here. He says, you choose not to serve me with joy and enthusiasm for the abundant blessings you've received from me. So because of that, okay, you got your choice. You're going to get to serve somebody else. You're going to serve your enemies whom the Bible will send against you. And you'll be left hungry, thirsty, naked, and lacking in everything.

And you'll be oppressed harshly until you are destroyed.

Continuing, the Lord will—he describes how that will be brought about. This was fulfilled in ancient Israel and Judah. We're not sure how this would be fulfilled today, but this is what God says.

The Lord will bring a distant nation against you from the end of the earth, and it will swoop down on you like a vulture. There's a nation in his language you do not understand. A fierce and heartless nation that shows no respect for the old and no pity for the young. Its armies will devour your livestock and crops, and you will be destroyed. They will leave you no grain, new wine, olive oil, calves, or lambs, and you will starve to death. They will attack your cities until all the fortified walls in your land, the walls you trusted to protect you, are knocked down. They will attack all the towns in the land the Lord your God has given you.

Interesting, I've been able to visit the land of Israel several times and walked through these towns and seen the fulfillment of this prophecy here. The walls that they trusted in to protect them were knocked down, and the people were slaughtered and taken into captivity.

The siege and terrible distress of the enemy's attack will be so severe that you will eat the flesh of your own sons and daughters whom the Lord your God has given you. The most tender-hearted man among you will have no compassion for his own brother, his beloved wife, and his surviving children. He will refuse to share with him the flesh he is devouring, the flesh of one of his own children, because he has nothing else to eat during the siege and terrible distress that your enemy will inflict on all your towns. The most tender and delicate woman among you, so delicate she would not so much as touch the ground with her foot, will be selfish toward the husband she loves and toward her own son or daughter. Then the Lord will overwhelm you and your children with indescribable plagues. These plagues will be intense and without relief, making you miserable and unbearably sick. This is what happens when health systems are overwhelmed and break down for whatever reason. Going back to what I just read here about cannibalism. That's what is being described here. It's documented in the scriptures for us. Josephus documents this happening in 70 AD when Jerusalem was surrounded by the Roman armies until people were starving and practicing exactly what we read here. It's ugly and it's hideous, but it's reality.

Continuing here, verse 60, he will afflict you with all the diseases of Egypt that you feared so much and you will have no relief. The Lord will afflict you with every sickness and plague there is, and even those not mentioned, it's in this book of instruction until you are destroyed. Though you become as numerous as the stars in the sky, few of you will be left because you would not listen to the Lord your God. Just as the Lord has found great pleasure in causing you to prosper and multiply, the Lord will find pleasure in destroying you. You will be torn from the land you are about to enter and occupy, for the Lord will scatter you among all the nations from one end of the earth to the other. There you will worship foreign gods that neither you nor your ancestors have known, gods made of wood and stone. There among these nations you will find no peace or place to rest, and the Lord will cause your heart to tremble, your eyesight to fail, and your soul to despair. Your life will constantly hang in the balance. You will live night and day in fear, unsure, if you will survive. In the morning you will say, if only it were night, and in the evening you will say, if only it were morning, for you will be terrified by the awful horrors you see around you.

The final verse of this chapter, then the Lord will send you back to Egypt in ships, to a destination I promised you would never see again. There you will offer to sell yourselves to your enemies as slaves, but no one will buy you. So this ends this chapter in this prophecy, of great blessings for obedience to God, national greatness for obedience, which has been fulfilled, fulfilled in ancient Israel, in David's and Solomon's time, fulfilled in the British Empire, fulfilled in the United States here. But it's also a prophecy of the consequences of what happens when we reject God, a prophecy of decline and collapse and horror such as we can't imagine for turning our back on God. Why do these things happen? The descendants of Israel, the modern-day English-speaking peoples of the world, for the most part, have been blessed unlike any nations in all of human history. They've been blessed with great miracles time and time again, like the huge swaths of land that I showed you earlier on the map of the United States. We've been blessed from foreign invasion, miracles there, and warfare, and so on. We've been given unparalleled access to God's Word, the Bible. And British and American missionaries have spread that word throughout the entire world to virtually every nation. We were built on our laws, our Constitution based on that word. And we were told in that word that we should be a holy nation and an example of God's way of life to the rest of the world. But as we're seeing before our eyes, we are actually sinking lower and lower in our corruption and perversion and rebellion against God than other nations.

And our nation has made a lot of collective choices over recent decades. We have banned the Bible from schools, from public life, and essentially told God, we don't want to listen to you. We don't need your word. So we threw it out of public life.

We banned prayer from schools and public life. And in doing so, told God, we don't need your help. We don't need to talk to you. We don't need you anymore. We legalized abortion and told God that we think that human life is worthless. And then we wonder why so many young school-aged teenage boys get guns and gun down their classmates. It's because they've been taught that human life is worthless. And we've trashed God's instruction about marriage and legalized what God calls an abomination. And now, in recent months, we have shut down churches by the thousands across the nation and told people they can't meet in person to worship God. But if you want to get together with 10,000 of your buddies and go out and loot and protest and burn down businesses while glorifying a career criminal, hey, that's okay.

Our political leaders will even get there and get out there and march in the street with you.

What we see from all of this is that God doesn't have to curse a nation. We are cursing ourselves because of our choices, because of our national sins.

And we're seeing this prophecy playing out before our eyes.

Abraham Lincoln wrote many years ago, many years ago, from whence or from where shall we expect the approach of danger?

If destruction be our lot, as a nation, he's talking about, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we will live forever or die by suicide. And today, we are seeing our nation die by self-inflicted suicide.

I hope God in His mercy gives us more time, time to repent and to turn and to realize the evil of the path that we are on and where it leads as we've come today. But may God give us eyes to see and ears to hear, and may we wake up to the reality of what is going on so that we are not caught asleep and not aware.

And that's the end of our sermon for today. We will be staying online for fellowship time afterwards.