The Fall and Rise of Globalism

On the Feast of Trumpets, we always talk about, of course, the seven trumpets in Christ's return, because that's what this day commemorates, a future event.

And over the last three years, I started to look at the prophecy sermons that I've given, and I talked about the Daniel 2 with the prophecies there, with the image of Daniel 2. I gave one on the mark of the beast, you know, all these different prophecies, and all of them eventually ended up with some connection to this day, of course. And, of course, last year during the Feast of Trumpets, I gave a sermon on the events that are going to happen leading up to the return of Jesus Christ. What I want to do today, though, is a little different.

I want to look at these events, but in a broader context. Now, when I say that, I'm going to do something I haven't done in a sermon, in a prophetic sermon, at least here, in the time I've been here in this area, is I'm going to spend some time going through some history. And I don't mean biblical history, which you're used to me talking about biblical history, you know. Let's go back and look at what it was like in the first century.

Let's go back and look at the world that David lived in, and let's look at the reality of the lives that they lived, where they lived. I'm going to talk about the history of the world you and I lived in over the last 100 years, because there's something very important we need to understand. Everybody is in turmoil, and I've given two or three sermons in the last three years, on dealing with the turmoil of the world we lived in.

We've gone through a sea change. The world's changed. I don't mean just our society. The world has changed, and this has happened before. It's happened before. Understanding that's happened before gives us a context for what will happen. And what we do know when we're done is that Jesus talks about what he calls the beginning of sorrows, and it is possible we're in the beginning of that. It's possible we're not. It's possible that the deterioration has to take longer. I don't know how fast it goes, but there are components that have come together in our world that haven't been like this since the 1930s.

In the midst of, in terms of just sheer scope of violence and starvation and just the sheer numbers, there was a period of time there between 1914 and 1945, which was the worst time to live on this earth. It was terrible. Now, I say the worst time to live in sheer numbers. I mean, if you lived in the Middle Ages in Europe, it was a bad place to live, okay?

But there was only about 60 million people, so the sheer numbers was different. The sheer numbers were different. Actually, the percentage of people who died in the Middle Ages from bubonic plague and war were much higher than what happened last century, but in sheer numbers, nothing like that had ever happened in history. We're going to have to look at some of this, understand where we are, and what we're going to talk about today is usually, when I go through a prophetic sermon, I usually have a PowerPoint. We're going to talk about something called globalism.

I'm going to talk about the fall of globalism and the rise of globalism and what that means. It may not mean what many of you think it means in terms of the greater historical context, okay? The greater historical context, and how that's going to tie into some of the prophecies about the return of Jesus Christ. Globalism basically is just a philosophy that if you open free trade and you open the borders—it's not that you can't have countries, but you open those borders and you have free trade and the free exchange of technology and the free exchange of communications—that what happens, everybody benefits from that, so the world gets better.

There'll be less wars, less starvation, less all kinds of problems. If you just basically unite the world through economics—so if you unite the world through economics, and then there's all kind of political things that get attached to that, some of them extremes on both sides, very extreme on all sides. But that's not what we're going to talk about.

We're talking about this globalism, because what happens too is cultures learn to appreciate each other, accept each other, and when that happens, nobody fights anymore. If everybody accepts everybody, and everybody trades with each other, then everything's good. And there's different ways to do that, but it is a philosophy that has become absolutely central to the global economy since 1945.

Absolutely essential. Every U.S. president believes in globalism, and every one of them has tried to enforce it and make it grow, mainly because we've been the biggest recipient of globalism. We've benefited more than anybody else. We've benefited more than anybody else, and there's reasons why for that. So what we're going to talk about then, I want to point out prophetically where we're going here, because we have this simple timeline of the seven seals. And we've talked about this many times. You know, the first four seals are also the four horsemen, four horsemen of the apocalypse. The fifth seal, God's people are martyred. Six seals is heaven, the six seals' heavenly signs.

Seventh seal is the day of the Lord and contains seven trumpets, so that when we get to those seven trumpets, especially the last of the seven trumpets, now we're dealing directly with Christ's return. So that's where here, that's what we're looking at.

And that's where on this chart, that's usually where we spend most of this day, talking about the seventh trumpet, right? Which contains seven plagues. That's where we focus. I'm going to shift the focus a little bit this time, because what I want to do is I literally want to move back to... Oh boy, that's tiny, isn't it?

Nobody can even see that. See that four... You with good eyes. Can you see that? Okay. Oh boy, more people have good eyes. Let's see about this side. Do you see that? Okay. We're going to zero in on the first four seals, and how it leads to this. And then we'll end with this over here. We're going to skip through this five, six, and seven very quickly. So we're going to move from here to here, because I want the context of something that happens, because I want you to notice the great tribulation, three and a half years, we talk about that all the time, all the time.

The three... You know, this great beast power is going to come on the earth, and there's going to be this false prophet that's going to be part of this beast. The two of them are going to work together to create this world power.

And then people ask me all the time, has the tribulation started? And I always say, no, and I get the same answer every time. And you've heard me say it in a sermon I gave about a year ago on the same subject. This has to happen before this happens. Now, we're going to talk about this, and you're going to say, wow, are you saying this is started today? And I'm going to say, well, good. I'll tell you when I will know. I'll be able to tell you exactly when we know that this has actually happened. I say it's completed, because it's a process. It may take years for it to actually happen, but it's a process. So I'm not going to make a prediction. I am going to say, for the first time in my lifetime, we're in a position where the first four seals could start happening. Okay, they could start happening. Now, you say, okay, now I'm going to make this really boring. I'm going to talk about history. Because I do not believe you can understand the context of a moment in time without understanding the context of how you got there. So I'm going to cover about 200 years of history in 10 minutes.

I wish I had three hours, but that's all I can do. When you do, you understand the world we live in actually sort of makes sense. Because it's crazy, right? It's chaos? Actually, yes. But it's a chaos that can be absolutely predicted. Absolutely predicted.

So let's go back now. There was an old order that existed that came out of the Industrial Revolution. Okay, some of you remember this from high school. Some of you may be in high school, but the way high schools are today, you may have never heard of the Industrial Revolution. I hope you have. The Industrial Revolution started in the 1760s around in England, extended out into the United States and all across Europe, and Europe and the United States became industrialized. And because of that, and the rest of the world was not being industrialized, not near at that level, what happened was empires formed. Russia had a big empire. England had a huge empire. Almost 25% of the world at one point was under English control. France had an empire. Germany had an empire. Spain had an empire. Everybody had an empire.

Australia, not the Australians, they've never had an empire.

Austria and Hungary had formed an empire, and they carved up Africa. All these empires carved up Africa, so every nation in Africa that had any kind of resource, one of the empires controlled it. They controlled the world economy. If you really wanted to trade, you had to make sure you were friends with Spain because Spain had warships, or England because England had warships, or Germany was a problem. They didn't have warships. So they couldn't control their empire the way everybody else could. Russia tried to do that and ended up fighting a war. I won't get into that with the Japanese in the early 1900s and got their entire fleet sunk by the Japanese. But you know what happened? Japan built an empire. So these empires controlled an attempt at a world economy, but they were always at war with each other. They were always fighting each other. They were always in order to maintain this control. And you know where the wealth of the world got funneled into? Europe and the United States. We were wealthy because the wealth of the world was funneled into us. We didn't have an empire, but once we get industrialized, we can produce more than anybody else. Now this is a huge subject. It's an hour alone, but this is very important, this age of empires. Because what you have then is World War I. World War I is because all the industrial age got out of control. Everybody had cannons that would fire a mile and with huge explosives. Everybody had airplanes. Everybody had trucks. Everybody had trains. Everybody had dreadnoughts, huge battleships. Everybody had them. Even the Germans by this time had built a fleet, which was amazing since they had no access, real access to the sea. But anyways, they had a huge fleet. Everybody had them. And eventually a war nobody wanted broke out and killed tens of millions of people, followed by the Spanish flu that killed tens of millions more.

And the entire system collapsed. The world, the attempted globalization through empires, collapsed. Russia ended up killing 20 million of their own people through starvation and war to become communist. China went through something very similar. All the empires collapsed. The system didn't work anymore. It absolutely collapsed. Nobody was in control. Nobody was in control. So what happens is the 1920s, this rise of communism, and a massive change in Western culture. You all heard of the Roaring Twenties, right? There was a sexual revolution in the United States in the Roaring Twenties. There was in France, too. There was in England, too. You know why? All those soldiers came back from World War I and said, life isn't worth living. That was the most horrible experience. They were all traumatized. And they all came back, and they drank, and they slept around. And the culture changed. No, not everybody was doing that. But it was meh. I mean, it's called the Roaring Twenties for a reason. I mean, miniskirts were not invented in the 1960s. Just look at Flapper. It was invented in the 1960s. It was invented then. It just, society said, hey, we got to stop this. Most people in the United States were criminals. You know why? Congress had outlawed booze, so everybody drank it illegally. So everybody was a criminal. Changing culture. 1930s is the Great Depression. No one thought President Roosevelt, FDR, did not think the United States was going to survive. No one thought anybody was going to survive. The result was, of course, World War II, where over 60 million people died. And there was no system anymore. There was no system anymore. There was no attempt at world economy. It was just a devastated world in which atomic bombs had even been used. So we've watched a system, a world system, an attempt to create a world economy through empires failed. Eventually destroyed itself, and the whole world came down to, when you add all that up, the tens of millions, probably hundreds of millions of people that died, and the starvation that caused from it. The disease that came from all this is amazing. Okay. So history lesson continues. 1945. The world's in chaos. The world's in chaos. The United States has a huge army. What are we supposed to do with it? Russia has a huge army. What are we supposed to do with it? Two different viewpoints of how the world should be run. Two totally different viewpoints.

And so you have the formation of the United Nations and the formation of the Soviet bloc, and the United States decided we had to rebuild Europe, or we'll eventually have to fight Russia.

So we rebuilt Europe. We rebuilt Japan. We made them trading partners. And you know what happened from that? It was amazing. Everybody who traded in this trading bloc got richer. Every country that got involved in this trading bloc became more wealthy. The Soviet Union and China were empty shells when it came to economics, because their systems don't work. So a new form of globalism was created by the idea what we have to do is create. If we unite all the nations together in trade, in sharing technology, and helping each other, the Soviet Union and China can't take over the world. And so the Cold War was fought, while the United States built economic base, and both of those countries built a military base. Now we built a military base, too, because we had the economics to do it, because everything around the world is being traded. So we now create this world economy, and there's an explosion in technology. Just like the industrial age created this explosion in technology, in 1890, everybody rode horses. In 1915, almost everybody rode cars. In 1890, no one had heard of an airplane. In 1915, they're shooting each other down and bombing London out of airstrips in Germany. Submarines are sinking thousands of ships all over the world. That technology jump was huge. Of course, the wars then kept it moving. The technology jump, 1945 to 1991. Just technology jump. If you would have asked someone in 1945 what's a computer, probably only one out of 10,000 people would have known, because the few computers they had were secret. Only the government had them.

So what we have is this new world economy form, and the world gets split into two different groups, and you're with one or the other. So where is the Cold War fought? Let's see, Korea. Between who? Well, the United States and its allies, and the Soviet Union, and the Chinese. And the Chinese. There's a war in Vietnam. Who's it fought between? The United States and its allies, and the Soviet Union and China.

Oh yeah. Yeah, we're fighting these wars, these two sides, but the one side builds an economy that crushes the other, and in 1991 the Soviet Union falls because it can't keep up with what the Western world can do. And you and I have Walmart. We get the benefit of this. We would complain. Everything's made in China. I mean, in Japan. Remember everybody used to complain? Everybody's made in Japan? Nobody says that anymore. Why? Where's it made now? Why? Well, the European Union formed in 1993, and now you have over half the world as a giant, globalized trading partners. And China realized they could not survive.

So we have a communist country trading with all of us, and they basically almost put Japan out of business. They became better capitalists than the Japanese. I'm stretching that a little, but you know what I mean? All of a sudden, all the, we just buy everything made in China. Why? Because it would cost us three times more to make it here. That's why. And we want it cheap. We benefit from the globalization of the world. Your cars are cheaper than they should be, at least they used to be. You know why? Well, let's see. Some of the parts were made in Mexico. Some of the parts were made in Canada. Cheaper than our labor would do here. And so what we did is we benefited. The Soviet Union tried to become part of this globalization. You know what happened to them? They're having trouble with replacing the parts on some of their tanks because they were made in Ukraine. No, wait a minute. We invade this country. Wait a minute. We buy parts from them. They're not going to sell them to us anymore. And so what we have is a new globalization in which the United States and its allies have created the most massive global economy in history. Well, isn't that good? Well, you and I benefited from it. India benefited from it. Most countries benefited a little bit. Many third world countries benefited very little. Oh, Egypt was able to get the Aswan Dam built by the Russians by getting him in there and saying, hey, we're your friend. And then they gave them all kinds of military equipment and then they kicked him out. Everybody. This game is being played in this because everybody has to be allies with somebody. Why is it that China, why is it that India today, they're both allies with Russia and they're publicly condemning them? You know why? Because the United States is a bigger market for their goods and they can't afford to end up on the losing side. Now that tells you something right there, what I just said. Glorious. Globalism is unraveling. The world economy that we built is coming apart. Just like it did by, you know, starting in 1914, by 1945, it didn't exist anymore. It's coming apart. There's a lot of reasons for that. India. India says, no, we're not going to be pawns of the United States and Europe anymore. So we're going to stand up and we're going to trade with China, some with China, and some with Russia. Oh, no, Russia's at war. Oh, no, yeah, you're a buddy. And then just, what was it, last week Putin sat down with their president and he told them, what you're doing is bad. You shouldn't be at war. And he realizes, I'm not getting any military aid from him. I got to go trade with somebody else. See, it's all coming apart. Even Russia is suffering from the fact that it tried to get into the global economy and then picked a war. Well, wait a minute. An event that happens in one place now affects everywhere. I mean, when they took that grain and it didn't get shipped out of Ukraine, right, because of the war, people will be starving in Africa.

There will be some starvation in Africa if more grain doesn't get out.

Now we have the problem with globalism. Eventually, there's still all kinds of competition. And eventually, there's still all kinds of wars.

And eventually, every little thing in one place affects another place. Plus, in globalism, the way it's set up now, something happened that I'm not sure anybody saw happening, although I think it was President Eisenhower sort of predicted it. What we have is corporations that are more powerful than countries. They control so much money, they're more powerful because why? They're trading with 50 different countries, and they have more power and sometimes more influence on culture than the church does. Right? And we just ask, I mean, the Christianity has less influence on the culture anymore than, dare I say it, Microsoft.

I'm just picking on him. Google, Amazon, right? Everybody has all this huge influence.

No one planned that. It just happened. Globalization created that. And in some cases, some very wealthy people have more control than they should just because they have enough money to make it happen. Right? So this whole thing, and not, you know, it used to be a wealthy person might have influence in his city, right? Not a wealthy people that influence entire nations, or trade between nations because everything comes down to trade. It's coming apart. I mean, you have whole new things you've never heard of before, like supply chain problems. Those are real. Supply chain problems are real because it unravels. China. Remember when everyone was saying, oh, China's going to be the great power of this century. They have a real problem. In 1980, through about 2000, I think it was 16, they limited everybody to one child. They had forced abortions and forced killings of children to keep their population down.

Then, because people valued males more than females, they killed off lots of females. There are millions and millions more males than females. Well, they just recently, in 2016, said start having babies. You know why? All you have to do is look at the demographic charts. Within about 10 years, a huge part of their numbers of their demographics are over 65 years old. And there are less and less and less people of the long younger ages, and they realized there was going to be a point. They couldn't even survive as a nation. The problem is they started having children now. It's 20 years before they're right, before they're adults. They're facing an economic collapse from demographics because of a single policy that now affects the entire world. We didn't pay much attention to how they were aborting their children at 50 million a year, whatever it was, did we? We didn't pay the attention to that. Now you add it up, and it's like, oh my, everything's unraveling. And we keep trying to find all the reasons and find somebody to blame. Just study what happened between the late part of the 1800s up through 1945, and it's just happening all over again. Only probably on a grander scale. Now I'm not saying it's all falling apart tomorrow. I'm not saying, oh, what are we going to do? Let's all go stock up on food. Although I would just say FEMA says you should have three months worth of food for any natural disaster. I think if they say that, but I don't get into that stuff. I know what I do. Okay. So what are you going to do? You just go buy a house off the grid someplace and stock up food and wait for the catastrophe to come? Well, as Christians, we're not supposed to do that either. We're definitely not supposed to go buy guns. Okay. I own a hunting rifle, but that's something different. So I took this time in a sermon because I want you to understand where we are in history. It's a sea change. It's never going back. It's never going back the way it was before COVID. It can't. And in the meantime, we all find out, well, a big part of the medical profession is basically, I don't want to say it's not everybody by any means, but there's a lot of incompetence.

And then you look at what happens in Vanderbilt, right? But see what's happening here again is just like there was a change in Western culture in the 1920s. Our culture is going through that kind of change. It's going through a terrible change. It's going through a worse change.

So all of a sudden, when we talk about the first four seals, we're going to see that it means something. It means something in the focal point of where we are in history. Let's go to Matthew 24, the Olivet prophecy. Now, we're not talking about the tribulation. We're not talking about the day of the Lord in the seven trumpets. We're talking about the time before that. They asked Jesus about the signs of His coming. And then he says in verse 4, This is just the beginning. This is not what globalization is supposed to create. It's about control over economies so that there's lots of buying and selling. That's the idea of globalization. And then everybody's supposed to get a benefit, although not everybody does. It's not the reality of globalization, but that's the idea behind it. That's not supposed to be the result. That is a world in which there is no central global control of what's going on. There's not medication getting to Central Africa. There's not food getting to Pakistan.

There's just, I mean, the Ukrainian and Russian grain that got out. Where do you think most of it went? Think of globalization. Not all of it, but where did it go? Anybody know? Europe. Well, if you're sending them tanks, we better get your grain. That's the way globalization works. Central Africa isn't sending them anything. But I mean, I understand how you're going to survive. They're helping us survive. We're part of Europe, so only, I don't know what it was, 30% got to go to Africa, where they will starve quicker. That's the reality of globalization breaking down. You're fighting for your survival. You're fighting for your survival. Watch India. They're really waking up to this. They're also waking up to the fact that they can stand and look China right in the eye and say, we're as bad as you are. We may not have, well, they do have nuclear weapons. They just want anybody to know.

So, it's coming apart. This is the world's largest nuclear weapon. It's the result of a non-globalized world.

Wars, rumors of wars, kingdoms against kingdoms, nations against nations. In other words, bigger conglomerates against other conglomerates, nations against nations, and widespread famine and pestilence, diseases.

COVID was mild compared to what's going to happen. It's just what's going to actually happen. So, man, now we're getting depressed. Okay. Let's look at what Revelation says. Revelation 6, about those first four seals, because this is a description of what's going to happen during the beginning of sorrows.

The beast power is not here yet, not according to Revelation. It's not here yet. Now, there may be forming. I mean, people may be talking about creating some conglomeration. Because the beast remembers 10 nations. It's not the EU. There's too many nations in it. It's not OPEC. Some people know it's OPEC. No, it's not. It is a revival of the Roman Empire, and I went through that before, so I'm not going to go through that here, because that's what Daniel 2 and Daniel 7 says.

So, we have, then, this vision given to John. He says, And I saw when the land opened one of the seals, and I heard one of the four living creatures saying with a voice like thunder, Come and see, and I looked. They hold a white horse. He who sat on it had a bow, and a crown was given to him. So we have this white horse. And he goes forth conquering and to conquer. Now, there's all kinds of explanations of what commentators think this white horse is. There is another white horse in Revelation, so we know. The other white horse we're going to talk about when we get to talk about the last part of this. We talk about this day. It's the return of Jesus Christ. So what this is, and this is important to know when we get to Revelation 13, which we'll just barely touch today, this religious system is going to help create the end time beast power. What's called the beast power is also called Babylon. And it's going to appear to be Christian. Okay, that's real important to understand. It's not going to be Hindu. It's not going to be Muslim. It's going to appear to be Christian. Okay, verse 3. Then I opened the second seal. I heard a second living creature say, Come and see another horse. Oops, hit the wrong button. Finally read.

It was granted to the one who said on it to take peace from the earth, and that people should kill one another, and there was given to him a great sword. Now what do we just read in Matthew? Oh, there'll be many false christs. There's gonna be wars. This is describing that same time. This is describing the same time.

Then he goes on and he says, and he opened the third seal, and I heard a third living creature say, Come and see. So I looked. We hold a black horse. And he was said, I had a pair of scales in his hand. He goes on and describes how he's talking about there's just the economies have collapsed, and you can't get food. You can't get food. You know how connected we are? There's a shortage of fertilizer because of a couple of different things happening in the world.

We'll grow food in Kansas. There's parts of the world where they will not grow food this year if they don't get that fertilizer. One thing affects everything now. Things that you don't even think about. Connect different parts of the world because of this globalism that happened because of the end of World War II. And so all these things can happen at this scale because of the very thing that was supposed to save everybody. Just like all the empires were supposed to make the world better by seizing people's territory and making them work for them and taking their resources. But the world got better. Well, they got better. Belgium got better. Belgium had an empire, too. Everybody had an empire that had industrialized. When other peoples are living almost in the Stone Age, you have total power. Now, I'm not talking about the conquistadors and that back in the 1600s. I'm talking about 1910. They didn't enslave enslaved people, but they did take over countries and use their resources. In the early 1900s, China had eight different European countries plus the United States controlling their economy. The empires worked. Of course, I don't know if you live in the far reaches of China. I don't know if it worked at the time, but it seemed to work, you know, but it collapsed. Well, the American globalism is collapsing. And people don't seem to understand. There's a reason why. I mean, we do have inflation because of overprinting of money, but that's only one reason why. The supply chain issues are real. They're real because the system's breaking down all over the world. He goes on. He says, after the black horse, I heard a voice.

Let's go to verse 7. He opened the fourth seal and I heard a voice of the living creature say, or the four living creatures say, come and see. So I looked to behold a pale horse and the name of it was death, and Hades followed after him. Actually, it's very interesting. In Greek, this isn't really pale. It's a light, sickly green. And since nobody had seen a light, sickly green horse, they translated it pale. It's really pale green. It's the color of a dying person from a disease. Okay? So now you have these disease epidemics. What did Jesus say was the beginning of sorrows? What did he say it was? See, these are the same things. Now you said, well, how I know when this all has started? I don't know. I mean, right now, this is the closest I've ever seen, but I don't know.

It could happen for the first time in my lifetime. I will tell you when it's completed. Okay? Because the Bible says when it's completed. Look here in verse.

Let's see. Let's go to verse or reading here. It says, it says, It looked, and we hold a pale horse, death and Hades followed him. Then read this next line. And power was given to them over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword, with hunger, with death, and by the beast of the earth. That's pretty much collapse, isn't it? Whole world collapses. And this isn't by the beast power. This is through the collapse of the world order, the way things had been set up and run for so long. It collapses. It doesn't work. It's going to collapse.

And now, no one is complete. And you can ask me, when we read the headline, you know, over the last three years, 25% of the world, one-fourth of the world has died. You can't hide that number, okay? When 1.5 billion people have died, everybody knows. Everybody knows.

You and I live in the sea change, where this could happen. If it doesn't happen, what comes out of this is going to be really weird.

Because we're never going back to 2017, 2018. You can't. Any more than they could go back. Once the first guns fired in 1914, they could never go back to what it was in 1910. They could not. It was all in motion. The collapse was in motion. The collapse is in motion. Now, I say, well, man, this is sort of...

Yeah, it's gruesome. But the bottom line is, we have to step back from the fear and the anxiety and the trying to figure out what's going on all the time and realize this is where Satan's systems always end up and collapse. They never work. And this is just one of his systems. And you and I happen to be a great benefit of it. You and I have cars and air conditioning and none of us are hungry, right? We'll have dessert.

We got a great benefit. We lived in a great time to live under Satan's rule. Plus, God blessed this country. We know that. God did some of this. God did a lot of it. But he was never going to save it. It was always headed towards this. It's always been headed towards this. From the moment they signed the Declaration of Independence, we were headed towards this. It could not save itself.

Only turning to God, and the country was never going to turn to God, right? Only individuals turn to God. That's why it's called the church age.

Because it's only in the church that salvation takes place through Jesus Christ. It doesn't come through politics. It never has and never will.

If we went back to Matthew 24, we won't go back there, but after he says these things about the beginning of sorrows, Jesus then says, and then there will be great tribulation. It's where we get the term great tribulation. It's when Jesus says, after the beginning of sorrows, then it really gets bad. There's great tribulation. Now, we have to believe God's going to take care of us, right? There are martyrs, but we have to believe, and even if we're martyred, it's because God gives us the strength to do it for Him, because we believe in Christ's return and we believe in the resurrection. We also know the church is going to be protected. Now, that's something I haven't covered in a long time, and I'm going to cover that here sometime. There is a protection of the people of God, some of them, because some of us are going to have to face martyrdom for God. He required the early Christians to do it. He may require us. Or, this may take enough time that all those old people may not be alive then. See, I can't put a time period on it. I can only tell you the cycle is there. It's there, but it's bigger than anything the world has ever seen. We've never been in a global economy like this. It's never happened to this exception. Romans tried to do it and did it for a long time. They never get the whole world involved, right? They never got Persia involved.

There are just certain places they've never gotten involved in their world economy, but they tried. The Assyrians tried it. The Egyptians tried it. The Bible is full of empires. This is beyond empires. This is beyond empires.

Let's go to Revelation 18. When Jesus Christ returns, this system called Babylon, called the Beast, which we see coming up in Revelation 13, it comes on the scene after 25% of the world has died. What we have in Revelation 18, now it may, I will say this, that beast may play some part in those first four seals, but its power is grasped at the end of the beginning of sorrows. I'm not saying it's not going to be forming and not have some impact on those events, but the literal control. What are the things that it does? We always zero in on the mark of the beast, which has to do with worship. The mark of the beast, and I remember I went through the man of sin. I gave a sermon on that. The mark of the beast is the worship of this image. But why? So you can buy and sell. It only lasts 42 months, but you know what the purpose of the beast is? First of all, to bring chaos out of the world. I mean, some kind of order out of the chaos. The chaos will be ecstatic. I mean, can you imagine 25% of the world dying? People will willingly follow the beast because he has answers. And you know what? One of his answers is, he rebuilds a global economy through power. He forces a global economy. If you do not get the mark of the beast, you don't get to buy and sell. He forces... I can fix this! We just got to get trade. We got to get... open up the sea lanes again. The reason there's a global economy today is one reason that it hasn't broke down before that. The U.S. Navy. We keep the sea lanes open. The reason the Age of Empires worked is because British kept the sea lanes open.

There's going to be nobody to keep the sea lanes open when this collapses entirely. Trade will have broken down. First thing he does is he... we've got to start trading again. We've got to get food to the people who are starving. We've got to get the medicine to people over here. And of course, the real wealth will come into the center of the beast power.

I find chapter 18 interesting because Babylon falls. It talks about how the world is mourning and the kings are mourning. But I want to pick up in verse 11. Okay, so Babylon falls, and the merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her, for no one buys their merchandise anymore. Merchant eyes of gold and silver and precious stones and pearls and fine linen and purple and silk and scarlet. Every kind of citron wood, every kind of object of ivory, every kind of object of the most precious wood, bronze, iron, and marble. In other words, there's actually the flow during the Great Tribulation because there's sort of a rebuilding of this global economy. There's luxury goods being bought and sold. It's not like the book of Eli. I mean, you've seen... how many of you have seen the book of Eli? A few. I'm not recommending it. I'm just saying it's an interesting movie. Where the world is in devastation because of nuclear war and different things that have happened, and it's just a devastated, you know, desert landscape. It's not quite like that yet. That's what it is. It's by the end, when Christ comes back, they're starting to buy and sell again. They're opening sea lanes. They may even have some of the railroads running again. They get trucks on the road. All over the world, people are starting to see something good happen, and the corporations that still exist, are still trying to exist, are buying into it because it's rebuilt. I'm not saying corporations are bad. I'm saying you have to have corporations to do this. They start manufacturing again. See, I'm not saying manufacturing is bad. I'm saying for the first time, someone who's been out of work maybe for years gets a job. He says then, cinnamon and incense and fragrant oil and frankincense and wine and oil, fine flour, wheat, cattle, sheep, horses, chariots. Not that people are going to be buying chariots, but hey, I actually have a chance to get a new car. My car hasn't run for two years.

We're getting some beef again. Our local store hasn't had beef for a long time. That's the effect on the world of the beast power for the average person who's willing to worship the beast and give their mind and heart to Satan. And it's all a big scam. It's all it is. It's Satan's big scam, but he's going to do it through the rise of a new globalism.

Because remember, this is the merchants of the earth that are saying this. And chariots of bodies and souls of men. That is frightening. This means that slavery is going to be back in vogue. They're going to be selling people. They're going to be selling people.

This new globalism, that's where it's going. But it falls. It's destroyed.

We're watching the fall of globalism. Okay.

God's going to take care of us, keep focused. I mean, tomorrow your life isn't going to come apart, but you may never be able to go to Publix and Kroger and have the same experience you used to.

And you may find that you can't afford things you used to, or you're going to walk into Walmart and, well, there's nothing on this shelf here.

Yeah, well, that's because it came from Taiwan and China just invaded Taiwan.

They haven't. I'm saying, you know, I mean, something's going to happen, and we're going to find goods don't happen back and forth. Things don't happen the way they did. Foodstuffs aren't going to come. Just be glad you don't live, maybe, in some of the islands of the Philippines where you may not have any food show up.

With the deterioration of globalism. And there'll be those who try to save it. There's going to be politicians who try to save it, and corporations who try to save it, and rich people who try to save it, and they can't. It is out of control. So let's go to Revelation 19 and say, this is what we zero in on today. I didn't mean this to be negative. I try to always make this day positive. But the reason I wanted to cover it was because the bottom line is, you and I are in a sea change, and it's never going back.

And yet one of the first jobs of a pastor is to deal with reality. Reality is it's never going back. That doesn't mean we have to be afraid. This, I...

It doesn't mean that we have to stop living, either. You live life every day. I mean, God only gives us so many days. You live every life with what God gives you. You enjoy your job. You enjoy your lunch. You enjoy your kids. I mean, you enjoy what God gives us. Sometimes you give prophecy sermons, and people are so afraid that they just want to go run and hide in a hole. No! Stand up and live the life God gave you. What if it takes five years before it really collapses? Well, I may be dead in five years at my age.

I don't want to waste the next five years waiting for it to happen. I do want to be spiritually prepared for it to happen. I want to be spiritually prepared for what happens if it happens in my lifetime. And you have to be spiritually prepared, and that's the point I'm trying to make. Don't get overwhelmed. Understand what's going on. It's a historical cycle. It was amazing while it lasted, but it was unique in history, and it can't survive. Any more than a Democratic republic of 340 million people can survive, it's too big. It can not survive.

I don't know what it turns into. I don't know what it becomes, but it's not going to be what we had 10 years ago, or 20 years ago, or 30 years ago. That's just reality. And if it continues to go on for a number of years, that's great. I still rather live here than any place else, right?

In Satan's world, I still rather be here than any place else. But it doesn't change the fact. We're of the kingdom of God. We are strangers in a strange land. So let's finish with Revelation 19, verse 11. After the fall of Babylon, and all the armies, including the beasts, still survives the fall of the city. He's there with his armies. Everybody's there, and they see something coming in the clouds. And I saw heaven opened. We hold a white horse, a different white horse. This is the white horse of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. This is the fifth horse. There's a fifth horse in this book. And he has said on it, was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war. His eyes were like a flame of fire, and on his head were many crowns. He had a name written that no one knew except himself. And it was clothed with a robe dipped in blood. And his name is called the Word of God, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is coming back. I need to go past these because there. Let's get past that stuff, okay? Sorry, I forgot I left that up there. Although I do like this one. You see the guy with the red eye? He was supposed to have two, but it burned out.

We couldn't get one, so we just filmed it. We thought it looked scarier with one red eye. Anyways, see they're not so scary when you know his eyes burned out, right? So I don't want the kids to be scared. Now, yeah, they had one eye because the eye was burned out. Or the light to be in the eye. We still have some of these props. Oh, man, I didn't do that. Okay, let's get out of that. He was clothed with a robe dipped in blood, and his name is called the Word of God. And the armies in heaven clothed in fight linen, wide and clean, follow him on white horses. That's the saints, brethren. That's those who have followed God. This is what he wants for us. This is what he wants for you. Out of his mouth was a sharp sword, and with a huge strike, the nations. And he himself will rule them with a rod of iron. He himself treads the winepress of the fiercest and wrath of the almighty God. And on his robe and on his thigh, his name is written, King of kings and Lord of lords. We're here to worship the King of kings and Lord of lords.

All this other stuff is nice information, but you and I aren't here to worry about globalism. We're here to worship the King of kings and the Lord of lords, and his God, our God. That's why we're here. The other stuff we need to know, the other stuff isn't the focus of life. It's not the focus of life. So remember, there is peace and joy with Christ when he comes back. But you know, you can have peace and joy now with Christ, even in the midst of all the chaos. We have to live every day, every day, wanting to be a child of God so that no matter what happens tomorrow, we're a child of God. That's all that matters. So they always blow the shofar in a synagogue. My problem is I forgot to practice. You know, I always do all the sounds in the synagogue. Ah, this thing, like I said, you'll never find anybody playing jazz on a shofar. So I'm going to see if I can get one note.

Yeah, I can't do the other. Then we got one note. So the shofar has been blown.

All of you have a good lunch, and I'm going to go thank Ray for letting us use this building again. And hopefully we'll have a bathroom here this afternoon. And we'll see you all back here at two o'clock.