How Did Society End Up As It Is?

I don't know about you, brethren, but just as the first message in which Gary Snyder brought this up, I also have heard this from many news commentators, and that is that society today appears to be more divided than any time since the Civil War in the 1860s. That is some 160 years ago.

How did society end up this way? Have you asked yourself that? How we have come to be in the society that we're in the midst of? I'm sure you have. So have I. I've always had that inquisitive nature to find out why things are the way they are. Our society is something that was built up. It wasn't something artificially created by nature. It's something created by human beings. How did we come to this type of society that we are living in?

There is an irony here, because this coming week we will be celebrating Thanksgiving. It is the 400th anniversary since the pilgrims arrived at Cape Cod and landed at Plymouth Rock. You might have seen an article that I wrote in this past Beyond Today magazine about that.

If the pilgrims saw what our society has become, they would be shocked, dismayed, and also astounded by all of the gadgets that have been invented.

People go around here in metal boxes with wheels. They never imagined somebody would be driving that way, but they just had horse and buggy in those days.

Of course, society has its good parts, and it has its bad parts.

For instance, illegitimate births have gone up from 28% in 1990, which was 30 years ago, to 40% now. Almost one out of every two women who are pregnant, they do it outside of marriage.

Most of these health organizations calculate, since 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government could pay for abortions, that there have been 60 million abortions since 1973.

We see today rampant crime. Everybody has to lock the doors of their cars, the doors of their homes, and the gates at night. There's no feeling of security.

Even when we came over here and settled down in Anaheim 19 years ago, my daughters would leave the doors of their cars unlocked.

Nobody stole things at that time. We'd asked the neighbors, and they said, no, we've never had any of the cars outside here broken into.

Well, boy, I tell you, what a change. Now, it's just a weekly occurrence. They're constantly talking about people getting robbed, and we ourselves, even being as careful, we've been robbed several times. Were they broken into our cars?

I'm sure a lot of people have had even worse things broken into their homes, or all kinds of issues. Crime is happening. The Pilgrims didn't have that type of problems.

They'd be very shocked to know that we have built bombs that run on nuclear energy that can wipe out a city in just a matter of seconds.

They would be very shocked. They only knew what bullets were in those days in cannon fire. If we had them sit and give them remote control and have them watch TV for a day, they would be so shocked. They would be scandalized at what we take for granted.

Like the frog in the pot, where you just gradually raise the temperature. Frogs being cold-blooded. They adapt pretty well.

Before they know it, they never jump out of the pot because they got used to the rise in temperature one degree at a time. Before they know it, they're cooked. They've been boiled.

We also have just gradually adapted by degrees.

There's been a market decline in attendance to churches.

In the U.S., it's 40% of people attend services. While in Britain, it's closer to 10%.

Most of Europe has the same number. It hovers around 10-15% of places like France, Italy, and others.

Very low amount of people take religion into account nowadays.

How did we get here to this present society? There have been many studies made.

Very fine books have analyzed how we have come to have the values that we have.

How it has become such a secular society when it used to be far more Christian and faith-led.

How did it come to that if you go to the universities, instead of them strengthening your faith, they help you lose your faith?

As a matter of fact, in one of the books that I've been reading on the subject, because again, all of these social issues that we see, it always brings up the question, how did it get there?

How did we get to this point? One of the books is called by Brad Scott.

He is a professor of English and communication at Golden Gate University in California.

He wrote the book, Streams of Confusion.

It says, 13 great ideas that are contaminating our thought and culture.

He analyzes it from the historical point of view.

How we got here with the ideas that slowly percolated and infected society, just like a virus.

He mentions here, as a professor, he has seen this. He himself was infected with many of these ideas.

Then a professor challenged him on the need for absolute values. He says they have to exist. He had taken it for granted that there weren't any. He started studying it and he realized he had been wrong.

There are absolute values. This is what he brings up.

He says, to understand this holy modern, often incomprehensible tendency and process in society, let's take this example. This is case number one.

Jim Thompson, a young man of 19 from a good Christian home, returns to a state university one fall as a sophomore.

As he starts taking advanced courses in the social and natural sciences, he finds that his Christian faith is beginning to fail him.

He learns that the universe is a closed system. In other words, there's no God involved.

It's just a system of matter and energy. And that life on earth has evolved by randomness and chance.

Out of a chemically based prebiotic soup, life somehow sprang, multiplied, slithered along the bottoms of still warm pools for eons, and then dragged itself onto the shore where, again over eons, it split, amoeba-like, into a myriad of forms.

The capacities of the mind, of the intellect, he learns are genetically determined.

Belief and actions are environmentally dictated and controlled.

What you believe is just something that, by your environment, is controlled.

All cultures and values are relative and equal. That's what the professors in the university are teaching.

The Judeo-Christian faith is just one culturally conditioned belief system, now in its death throes, along with the puritanical, patriarchal forces that spawned it.

He is further taught that homosexuality is a valid lifestyle, and that the only salvation for America is a socialist-minded pluralism, one that creates a level playing field for all cultural expressions. Everything should be tolerated. Everything should be accepted.

By years end, Jim writes to his parents, telling them that he is abandoning his faith.

Like the lifestyle of his parents, it's anachronistic, which means it's out of tune with the times, and he is moving in with his girlfriend. So you see, he just says, Did I bring my water? I think I'm still going to need it for a moment.

So you see, beliefs have consequences on your actions. You don't believe God exists. Evolution is the way you've come to be. And so, he begins to live with his girlfriend.

By spring break, when Jim visits his parents for two days but refuses to attend church services, he has become fully converted to his new way of thinking. He is sporting an earring, deferring to his mauve-hair, nose-ring girlfriend, and pontificating, which means kind of preaching to others, about gay rights, women's rights, and everyone's rights to do as he or she pleases, and to experience happiness.

He expects his parents to accept him the way he is, but he lets them know, in no uncertain terms, that they aren't all right the way they are. After reasoning with Jim, all that Mr. and Mrs. Thompson can do is pray for him.

How many times does that happen? You see, at the universities, they don't give you both sides of the coin.

They don't give you the other side. They start with evolution, and all of these values are relative.

And the poor student is shocked by all of this, and they don't explain both sides of the story.

It happened to me as a young man, too. I believed in evolution until I learned about the church, started reading the other side with the church literature that dealt with evolution.

And I realized that there are two sides to the story, and that I had been wrong about it. But you don't get that experience at the universities. Just like the fish, or also the animal lemmings, they just follow blindly what their professors tell them.

And pretty soon, they've changed their lifestyles. So, this is one of the books that helps you understand, in the past 400 years or so, how these ideas that were very damaging, these rotten apples that were put there in society, and they were pretty much eaten. And, of course, the indigestion took place afterwards. Another book that I've read is called The Battle for the Bible by Harold Linsel, who was a professor of theology at Fuller's Seminary in Pasadena. I went to Fuller's Seminary a couple of times, listened to some of the professors there, and he was mentioning how Fuller's Seminary was founded at the same time as Ambassador College in 1947. It was supposed to be a very conservative Bible college that was going to stop the tide of all this liberal theology that was coming in and flooding the United States from Europe. It was founded by very conservative men. But it happened that the founder, the name was Fuller, had a very intelligent son, Daniel Fuller, and the father sent him to Europe, to Germany, to study high theology. They infected him to the point where he came back, and he didn't believe anymore that the Bible was infallible. He started with all of this liberal thinking that we can't rely on the Bible, and we can't be sure about values. The father died, and he became the president and the guiding influence. So, a lot of these men eventually left Fuller's Seminary, because it was becoming just as liberal as the rest of the theology schools in the United States.

It is only a shadow of what it was when I was there, at least. This is a very interesting book, because it talks about the battle to see who represents the Bible in the United States, and how liberal theologians have basically now taken over. There are just maybe very few seminaries that are still conservative-minded, but the great majority of you go there, and they will fill your head with all the doubts. Again, all of these mega ideas that the liberal society has accepted, it has gone into these theological seminaries as well.

I remember even some of my friends in Ambassador College, after they graduated, some of them went to some of these liberal theological schools. Before you know it, they quit attending. They started thinking with this liberal idea that the Bible can't rely on it fully, and questioning all kinds of things. They don't start believing that the Bible is God's inspired word. They start out with the Bible as simple literature, and so then they question everything. They built their house on sand. Some of those friends that I had basically left the faith. They went into the world, became hippies at that time, and so this is the danger that we have to face today. Another third book that I've been reading again is called The Faith of our Founding Fathers by Tim LaHaye.

It explains also how from Europe, with liberal thinking, especially in Germany, what they call higher criticism of the Bible, where they questioned everything, and how that eventually entered the teaching here in the U.S. and many famous theological schools, such as Harvard University, Yale, and others that were, first of all, theological schools that were conservative, and how they eventually got infected by this German high type of criticism of the Bible. You go there to Union Seminary in New York. There's another one. Believe me, you come with a faith that you believe in the veracity of the Bible, and you come out of there just thinking, ah, it's another book. We can't rely on it.

Because, again, they only give you one side of the story. And that's how society has become. So liberal-minded, how extreme left it has become, not only in values, but also in religion as well.

That's why you see many of these churches are closing down around us. Because the pastors that they trained in many of these schools, they're not sure about the Bible and the teaching. And so they, in fact, their membership. I remember before we came to this church, there was another one that we were looking at, which was a Methodist church.

And that church over there in Fullerton had 700 people meeting there. Do you know what it's down to now? 40. 40 people. And so they're so desperate, they say, we'll take you. Please, on the Sabbath, on Saturdays, you're welcome to come here. And it was very pitiful. The thing is, everything is pretty rundown. The people told us that some of the air conditioners don't work. So in the summertime, you've got to bring out fans. The areas of the kitchen look pretty unhygienic.

And so we decided not to go there, but it's just slowly dying. And this is the trend. And of course, the children that are looking for inspiration, for guidance, for principles. As the Bible says there in 1 Corinthians 13, let's go there for a moment. 1 Corinthians 13. It says here that, verse 1, Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal.

And that this is just like going to services, and all you hear are drums being beaten, and all of this stuff that really doesn't teach your mind to think, to analyze. Remember, our thoughts should first be developed in our mind, and then go into our hearts, where our feelings are. But if you start out with feelings, many times your brains don't really connect. You don't discern things properly. Now, I'd like to bring up the subject that, although these books are very fine, as far as analyzing society today, there's one problem with them. That is, these authors don't understand the truth of God. They have some understanding about Christianity, but as far as the truths are concerned, they don't understand those basic fundamental truths that are in the Bible.

They have a wrong idea about God. They think He's a Trinity. Three persons in one. They have a wrong idea of man's destiny. They think you're either going to go to Heaven, or you're going to go to Hell. They believe you have an immortal soul. The Bible teaches you that you have a mortal soul with a right to a resurrection. You can receive immortality, but you don't already have immortality. All of these false teachings contaminate religion. They don't have the right basis.

Even the pilgrims that came over and tried to live a very Biblical life, they came with a lot of wrong teachings and doctrines. You see, those wrong doctrines undermine society, then as it does today. Where can we find the answer to how the world is the way it is? Incredibly, it's found in the Bible. God has given us a history of mankind from the time of Jesus Christ to the present time, and even beyond the future.

He does it as simply and as majestically as you can imagine. He uses an analogy of two women to separate mankind. Right now, there are two women which are an analogy for God's church and then the churches of this world, and all what is involved in the churches of this world. I find that incredible. I was telling my wife that this morning. Can you imagine understanding something as basic as this?

Because in this society, why do you have Protestants fighting Catholics, and you've got all of these extremes, and you have all of this. Why? Because it's founded on the sand of man's reasonings, all of these wrong ideas. From Charles Darwin with evolution, Karl Marx with his socialist ideas and communist ideas, and then you had Freud with psychology. You shouldn't worry about guilt. You should eliminate guilt. Of course, we should keep guilt.

When we are guilty, that's a censor that tells us something is wrong. Let's straighten ourselves out. Freud said, oh no, that's just a wrong symptom, and you should get rid of guilt. I have a funny story along that line. It was these two neighbors. They knew each other for a while, and of course, they put out their garbage can outside every week. And all of a sudden, one of the neighbors realized, hey, somebody is knocking over this trash can.

So the next week, he got up a little earlier, put his trash out, and what did he see? He saw his neighbor come and knock it down. He caught him, and he said, what are you doing? He said, oh, yeah, well, this is the way I've been dealing with things. I just came to the idea that I need to do this. The man said, well, how can you do this and be damaging my property?

And the guy said, well, I can't help it. This is the way I feel. So he said, well, guess what? I've got a good friend. He's a psychiatrist. And I'm going to pay for you to go two weeks to this psychiatrist, so that you'll get your head straight now, because there's a real problem with you. And the guy said, oh, I don't have to pay? Okay, I'll go. So he went for those two weeks, and guess what?

Nothing happened with his trash can. So the man was happy. And then he completed the two weeks, and the next week he puts his garbage out, and then what happens? He sees it knocked down again. And he goes to his neighbor and says, well, what are you doing? I thought you already got cured over this. And the man said, well, you know, the psychiatrist really helped me. I used to feel bad doing this. Now I don't feel bad at all.

See, I got rid of the guilt. And that's how crazy society is today. And you see that with the protests and people knocking down things, and they've been taught, you shouldn't feel guilty. You've got a right to knock out all of the statues of heroes and all of these traditional heroic monuments that we have.

And so for the remainder of the sermon, I want to focus on the Bible's point of view, and how God divides the church and the churches of the world into two symbols. And they're found in two chapters in the Bible. This is very important. If you ever want to know history, as it actually is, from God's point of view, He put it in the book of Revelation. So let's go to Revelation 12, and I'm just going to go over that and explain to you that God is focusing on that little church, a woman that is pure and chaste and is different from the world's values.

And it says in Revelation 12, in verse 1, it says, Now a great sign appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with a moon under her feet, and on her head a garland of twelve stars. So this woman radiates light, as you know, sunlight, the light from the moons and the stars.

And of course, it's a symbol, as we see in Revelation, I mean, Genesis 38, where it talks about Joseph and how he had a dream and he saw himself and his brothers, the stars, his father and mother, the sun and the moon. And so it's talking about the woman that is actually part of Israel and how God's chosen people, that's representing these people on earth. And then it goes on to say, Then being with child, she cried out in labor and in pain to give birth.

And so this is talking about, from Israel comes the Messiah, comes Jesus Christ, the birth of Jesus Christ.

And another sign appeared in heaven, Behold, a great fiery red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns and seven diadems on his heads. Verse 9, it says that that dragon is Satan. And so when Jesus Christ was about to be born, he was just waiting there to try to destroy Jesus Christ.

It says, verse 4, His tail drew a third of the stars of heaven and threw them to the earth. Those are the third of the angels that are under His command. And the dragon stood before the woman, who was ready to give birth, to devour her child as soon as it was born.

She bore a male child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron.

And her child was caught up to God and His throne. Here we have a history, which is talking about the women Israel, where the Messiah would come, and that that Messiah would one day rule the earth.

And he carried out successfully his ministry, died, was resurrected, and now is at the right hand of God, as a triumphant arrival in heaven.

And then it goes on to say, the next historic event, and remember, we're talking about from the time of Christ, all the way to His return, there are two historic events that God focuses His attention.

One is before Satan's rebellion, in the end times, and the other is after Satan's rebellion. So Satan's rebellion has not happened yet. He will try to storm up to heaven, and try to take over, and he will be cast down. And it tells us there's a three and a half year period, where Satan will be angry, and will persecute the church. But before that rebellion, we have the following Scripture. It says, Then the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God, that they should feed her there one thousand two hundred and sixty days.

Now, in the Bible prophecy, sometimes God represents a day as one year. Ezekiel 4, 6, for example, tells us that. And from what we see here, the women didn't just flee and stayed in the place for three and a half days. It doesn't make sense. That's a very short time. That's half a week. But, twelve hundred and sixty years is a considerable amount of time before Satan eventually rebels.

And what period do we find that coincides with those twelve hundred and sixty years? We can call it the dark age of the church. The worst period of persecution where the church has to flee and go to a place of safety and generations would survive until that period of persecution would be lifted. And I was just looking at some of our old correspondence course, Bible correspondence course, and we had in the section or the one that has to do with this flight, it was number fifty.

Correspondence course number fifty, and it already says that. So, we've been preaching this for sixty years. The flight of the church took place and Constantine adopted Roman Catholicism as the official church of the Roman Empire. And there he started a vicious persecution against all the ones that kept the Sabbath, kept Holy Days, that were Christians.

And now the church that rose up at this time had Constantine's sword. Now it had the military backing, and it was a relentless and merciless persecution in the Roman Empire. And what we find is that those that are Sabbath keepers, those that keep God's feasts, and other commandments of God, of God have to flee to a place. And where we see they flee is to an area today is marked by Armenia, which is in the Middle East area. And it was a place that was not controlled by the Roman Empire. It was where the Taurus Mountains separated, and so they were left in peace during that time.

So if you sum or add 1260 years to 325 AD, you come up to 1585, which is precisely the moment when the Catholic Church loses its sword, its power to impose Catholicism with the inquisitions and with the crusades and just merciless spying on people. And that happened when Spain declared war against England during the Queen Elizabeth I, and where the Spanish Armada tried to go and invade England so that it would become a Catholic country and they would impose Spanish means to it, and they were defeated. The Spanish Armada was destroyed, and after that, Spain became a second-rate nation, and the Pope no longer had the powerful military to impose its will.

So from that time on, England becomes this purveyor of getting the gospel out to the world, of toleration in religion, and basically as England rose in power, then the gospel could be preached. And that's why in the United States, even from the time at that period, there was freedom to be able to do things that you could never do in the Spanish-dominated European center. And so that's how we basically determine it. Of course, God has the last word because it's not here. It just says the woman fled for that period of time.

But that's our best understanding. Continuing on, it says, The next great event, verse 7, And war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought with the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought. But they did not prevail, nor was a place found for them in heaven any longer.

This is going to happen in the future. We don't know when Satan's rebellion is going to take place, but it is linked to that three-and-a-half-year final period. So the great dragon was cast out, that serpent of old, called the devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world. He was cast in the earth, and his angels were cast out with him. Then I heard a loud voice saying, In heaven now salvation and strength and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ, have come.

For the accuser of our brethren, who accused them before our God day and night, has been cast down. And they overcame him by the blood of the lamb and by the word of their testimony. And they did not love their lives to the death. Many faithful Christians would die. Therefore, rejoice, O heavens, and you who dwell in them, woe to the inhabitants of the earth. And the sea for the devil has come down to you, having great wrath, because he knows that he has a short time.

So when he's cast down, that's going to be when things really are going to heat up in the world. And then it says, Now when the dragon saw that he had been cast to the earth, he persecuted the woman who gave birth to the male child.

So here we go back to the symbol of God's true church. He persecutes this woman. Now we're talking about the end time period. We're talking about Christians at the time of the end time. It says, But the woman was given two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness to her place, where she is nourished for a time and times and half a time from the presence of the serpent. So here we have a second period. The first period was before Satan's rebellion, and we see the dark period, the dark ages that the church had to go through. But then we have a period after 1585 where the gospel can go out.

We're still in that period of getting the gospel, but there's going to be a moment when Satan is going to intervene, and we're not going to be able to get the gospel out. So God knows the church would be totally destroyed if he allowed Satan free reign, but he doesn't. And so of this little church that the world doesn't really consider important, that's the group that is given the ability to fly to a place where God has prepared, and they will be protected for three and a half years.

He goes on to say, So the serpent spewed water out of his mouth like a flood after the woman, that he might cause her to be carried away by the flood. We understand since the flood and waters in Revelation 17 tells us there's many peoples, like soldiers, and he's going to send an army so the church doesn't get to its place of safety.

And then God does intervene, verse 16, We have examples of God opening up the earth, and people being swallowed, like with Achan's sin back in the book of Numbers. He was the one that went into Jericho and stole some things, and there was a curse placed on God's people until Achan was removed. Also, the case of Korah, the rebellion of Korah in Numbers 16. That's the one I really want to focus on, not so much Achan. Because there, Korah and all his rebellious group were swallowed. God opened up the earth and then closed it back up. This is what's going to happen. Verse 17, when Satan can't get to the church, the church is in its place of safety, it says in verse 17, So you see the two descriptors of the true church.

It's a church that's keeping all of God's commandments, not just some. To be part of God's true church, you have to be keeping all of them, which means the fourth commandment, which has to do with the Sabbath, with the annual Sabbath. The church that isn't keeping that is not part of that woman that is described here.

It also has the testimony, which means the witness, that Jesus says these people are keeping my commandments as I have taught them. They are faithfully following God's ways. So you see, that's what separates us from the pilgrims, from the Protestants, from the Catholics. And this is the description of that woman that God thinks about so much.

Now, let's go to Revelation 17, to the second woman of Revelation. But this is an evil and sinful woman, a fallen woman. Revelation 17, it says, It says, Again, the symbol of waters, as we will see, has to do with peoples, multitudes. With whom the kings of the earth committed fornication. Here, talking about church and state being all colluded, and contacts, and polluted by that. This is the same way when Israel would fornicate with the gods of other nations.

So here, it's talking about spiritual, the way the church is involved in the worldly affairs. It says, And the inhabitants of the earth were made drunk with the wine of her fornication. What is the wine of her fornication? It's her teachings.

People, even if it's irrational, they look at the Bible and they're reading it wrong. They don't believe in a commandment-keeping church. They believe that's been done away with. Some spell has gotten into them and they can't reason logically. It goes on to say, verse 3, So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness, And I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast, Which was full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. This is symbolic of the period where the church now is, After Constantine's adoption of it, it becomes the great church.

And it would have seven revivals until the time of Jesus Christ. The final revival, it would have ten rulers that would rule over that system. And we are still not there yet, but six already have happened, six revivals, And there's just one left. This European Union with ten rulers that eventually will govern them. It goes on to say, The woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet, so it's a very rich church, very powerful.

Have you ever seen the dresses and the costumes that many of these cardinals wear, And they got ruby and gold, go to the Vatican sometime? An enormous amount of wealth. No church ever showed that type of wealth, but it says here. And of course, the red of the cardinals and purple, also of bishops, And adorned with gold and precious stones and pearls, Having in her hand a golden cup full of abominations and the filthiness of her fornication.

So again, people have to take communion, And you have a cup that you have to go before, And you take that host, as they call it, and that makes you into a Catholic. You have to do that every week. I know, I had to do that until I came into the church. And it says, And on her forehead an aim was written, Mystery Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots, and of the abominations of the earth.

So this church doesn't really come from the time of Christ. It comes before that, all the way to the Babylonian period. And Babylon was always the adversary. It had the alternate religion against God's people. It was Babylon that came up against it. It was the powerful religion of its day. And I saw the woman drunk with the blood of saints, And basically that church has killed more Christians than any Roman Empire, Or any military up to the present. And with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus, And when I saw her I marveled with great amazement. But the angel said to me, Why do you marvel? I will tell you the mystery of the woman, And of the beast that carries her, which has the seven heads and ten horns.

And basically here you have the two great leaders that are going to arise. One is called the Beast, which is this system that goes all the way back to the time of Babylon. And today it's that revived Roman Empire, but there's a woman that rides it. And so that is the religious power, with a certain person riding with the reins of power. And who do you see? That the European leaders and the other leaders, who is it that kiss the ring of somebody?

Well, that's the religious power, and the kings all recognize the power that's there in Rome. I'm going to go to verse 12 to shorten things up a bit. It says, The ten horns which you saw are ten kings who have received no kingdom as yet, but they receive authority for one hour as kings with the beast. These are of one mind, and they will give their power and authority to the beast. They will make war with the Lamb, and the Lamb will overcome them. So they have to exist when Jesus Christ returns, because they're going to make war against that returning Christ.

For he is Lord of lords and King of kings, and those who are with him are called chosen and faithful. Then he said, The waters which you saw where the harlot sits are peoples, multitudes, nations, and tongues. And the ten horns which you saw on the beast, these will hate the harlot, make her desolate, and naked eat her flesh, and burn her, so eventually it will turn against that false prophet. For God has put into their hearts to fulfill his purpose, to be of one mind, and to give their kingdom to the beast, until the words of God are fulfilled. And the woman whom you saw is that great city which reigns over the kings of the earth. And so we have here a brief history from the time of Christ all the way to today. And there are two groups on the earth. One is that small persecuted church that keeps all the commandments of God and has the testimony of Jesus. And then you have the other groups that this woman has perpetrated and multiplied its religious system into all of this traditional Christianity. And that's why the world is the way it is, because that traditional Christianity was contaminated from the start, and eventually it brought this liberal system into place. Plus, the philosophers during the past 400 years that went against the church and began to separate everything from religion. And when you go to the university, you see effectively. Even from the schools, you can't even have school prayers. You can't talk about the Bible. You can't talk about God. You can talk about all the other multi-ethnic ideas, but not about God. And that's the way we have come to the society that we live today. Let's just review quickly action steps that we can take. Number one, it says, remember that two women, they are in revelation to bring clarity to why the world is the way it is. If we leave the church, if we go into the world, we are part of that system. God no longer considers us as part of that humble, chaste woman that is the bride of Christ when he returns. Secondly, let's appreciate what we understand, the value and treasure of what legacy this is. Let's appreciate it. We don't deserve it. I don't deserve to be teaching these things. This is not something that I learned in the world. This is because I came into the church. I learned God's truths, and it's something that we are all receiving. You're never going to receive anything like this. You can have all the books in the world that explain the part about society, which is helpful, the history, but not about keeping God's commandments and having the testimony of Jesus Christ as that little persecuted church that did not compromise with the truths of God. Thirdly, let's continue to help get the gospel out, the true gospel of the kingdom, and prepare a people for the coming kingdom of God. That's part of what we're doing here. We've got to help get the gospel out and prepare ourselves. Those that come into the church help them so they will one day be there when Christ returns. Finally, let's analyze world news, what you see, the programs that you listen to, and use this lens of God's Word. Those two women, to see that even the best that society has, it's still flawed. It's still infected with wrong teachings. It's not going to bring the solution to man's problems. But God has this church humble, little, but uncompromising. As far as keeping God's truths, this is where we have our place of safety right now. Our place of refuge, because things are going to really heat up in the world. We have to be preparing ourselves for that coming kingdom.

Let's end with one scripture, Luke 10, verse 21.

Luke 10, verse 21. It says, In that hour, Jesus rejoiced in the Spirit and said, I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things, talked about these truths, from the wise and prudent, and revealed them to babes. Simple people. Even so, Father, for it seemed good in your sight.

And then it says, in verse 20, it says, Nevertheless, He tells His disciples, do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rather rejoice, because your names are written in heaven. Yes, God has a registry of all those that have been baptized, received God's Spirit, and are part of that precious, humble, chaste woman that is still doing His will. That's what we should focus on. That's why the world is the way it is. And that's why this church is the way it is.