Where Are We in Prophecy

From our pastor, Mr. Scott Ashley.

Thank you, Barry. Good afternoon, everyone. It's good to see all of you here today. I think that is a first, that everybody was seated for the first time when services started here. Good to see all of you here. Good to see you. Some faces haven't seen in quite a while. Good to have Robert and Mary back from there. Not quite around the world journey, but a pretty good chunk of it. Hope you had a great time. Followed some of your blog items and Facebook posts there. That was good to see. Everybody sure sounds wonderful today. It's nice to have some of the voices back. Great to have Marcia back here with us, too, after an absence there. She challenged everyone to a race around the parking lot afterward. If anybody wants to take her up on that. I thought it would...

There. How about that? Okay. She not only dresses me, she keeps me in line in so many ways here, it's just great.

I thought it would start out... This wasn't part of my sermon notes, but since I... When I sent out last night's update and news items, there was a coup taking place, or properly an attempted coup, I guess, taking place in Turkey. I thought I would start with a few comments about that. I did during the announcements in Denver, and I know several of you went to the feast in Turkey last year and had a wonderful time over there. It's a place that holds a special place for me, because so much of what took place in the New Testament took place in the land of Turkey. What is today Turkey, Asia Minor, and the ancient world. I thought I would comment briefly about that, what is taking place. It's not every day you see a coup. Cous are very high-risk endeavors, as we're seeing. The coup plotters are being rounded up right now, and probably most of them will be taken out and executed and never heard from again. Frankly, that's the way it works in that part of the world. But I thought I would comment a bit on what is taking place behind the scenes there, because it is important to our understanding of what is taking place in that part of the world and why. Turkey, as I have commented and shown in our follow-up Bible studies after the feast about the early church there in Asia Minor and so on. Turkey is one of my favorite countries in the world to visit. A very wonderful climate, very agriculturally productive. It's very much like Italy, if any of you have been there before.

Quite mountainous, a lot of beautiful olive groves marching up the hillsides toward the mountains. Very fertile land, very ancient land, ties in a lot with New Testament history there. Its people are incredibly friendly, very welcoming toward Westerners for the most part.

Very industrious people, very hardworking. In contrast to what you see in most of the Muslim world, where the men sit back and smoke cigarettes and watch their women do all the work, frankly. So the Turks are not like that. They're quite a different people. Very hardworking, very intelligent, very industrious people. What has been going on for the last few centuries in the Muslim world is we basically, to use modern countries, we basically have four countries in the Muslim world, all of whom think they should be the leader of the Muslim world.

And those countries, in no particular order, are Turkey and Iran, because they're not ethnic Arabs, so they think they're smarter than Arabs, and they are. And they think they would do a better job of running the Muslim world, which they would. If you've ever been there, you know what I'm talking about. So there's those two countries, and then there's also Saudi Arabia, because it is the home place of the Islamic holy sites Mecca and Medina, the holy cities of Islam, and then Egypt, because Egypt has basically been the most populous Arab nation, Muslim nation in the Arab world.

Actually, the most populous Muslim nation is Indonesia, but talking about the Arab world in general. And they also have been the center of the Islamic world for many centuries. And a couple of years ago, you could have added Iraq in there as well. Of course, it's no longer a nation, as we understand it, having lost about a third and a half of its territory to the Islamic State.

So don't include that anymore. Iraq, as we have known it, no longer exists in a functional form. So you do have those four who, for various reasons, claim to... stake their claim to be the leader of the Arab-slash-Muslim world.

And frankly, the Turks would do a much better job at it than anybody else, I think. So I can't speak highly enough for the Turks in general, and Turkey is a place to visit. And I'm personally very saddened to see the coup fail. It's not often that you want to see a coup succeed, but in these circumstances, I think the coup would have been something very beneficial for Turkey, because of Rijep Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Turkey, whom they were trying to overthrow. You'd never get that pronouncement out of the way his name is spelled, the Turkish alphabet, as considerably different sounds than the way it looks in English.

It's Rijep Tayyip Erdogan. But he's got two very bad qualities. One is he is an old-school dictator, like so many people think Saddam Hussein in that part of the world. And he's also a more hardline Islamist, Islam fundamentalist. He's been trying to transform Turkey, more or less, if you think of Iran, he's been trying to transform Turkey into that kind of country, and was heavily allied with Iran until a few years ago, when he had a falling-out with him.

He's so hard to get along with, he's so egotistical that he has basically destroyed Turkey's relations with every other country in the region, with Lebanon, with Greece, with Russia, with Iran, with Israel, just about anybody there. He came into office in 2003, when Turkey had good relations with most of its neighbors, and has managed to destroy that, because of his arrogance. So that's his leaning. He wants to take Turkey in a fundamentalist Islamic direction. Turkey was the heart of the Ottoman Empire for a number of centuries, and fell at the end of World War I, defeated in World War I. The Ottoman Empire collapsed, and Turkey, under Kemal Ataturk, became the leader of Turkey, and transformed it into a secular nation, instead of a Muslim or Islamist nation.

That has been kind of ingrained into the Turkish consciousness for the last 100 years, basically since the end of World War I. They've been quite successful at that. They removed Islam as a requirement for holding government office, and different things like that. Basically removed the influence of Islam from running the country, which is a very good thing. It's allowed Turkey to advance far beyond what its Muslim neighbors have been able to, being shackled, as they are, by the Islamic religion.

So, the army has been the guarantor of Turkey's secular form of government, and that's why there have been four or five coups over the years. The last one in 1980, if I remember correctly. And Erdogan, since he has been in office, has been trying, as I mentioned, to move Turkey in the Islamist direction. To do that, he has done two things, primarily.

He has packed the courts with Islamic fundamentalists. Again, think Iran. And also done the same thing with the military. Secular generals, admirals, colonels, and so on. He has eased out, forced into retirement, and replaced them with fundamentalist Muslims. Again, think Iran. So, frankly, he had pushed too far, and the military started pushing back. And that's what prompted this coup.

And what is at stake is the nature of Turkey going forward from this point. Turkey, of course, is a member of NATO, so it's a crucial American ally in a very dangerous part of the world.

And so, basically, the military had as much as they could. They could see the direction he's trying to take the country. He's been consolidating more and more power to himself. That's why he's kind of an old-school dictator. He was elected to the office of Prime Minister, which was the premier office, elected office in the country. He was term-limited out of that. You can only serve two terms, according to the Turkish Constitution. So he then took the position of president, which is actually a second-tier office, according to their constitution. It would be rough equivalent to the U.S. It would be kind of like the vice-president's job. You're kind of a figurehead, the guy who shows up at the funerals and so on, but doesn't really have a function. So what he's done is garner more and more power to that position, and chart with the goal of setting himself up as president for life, which is typical of dictators in that part of the world. When we were there last fall for the feast, we could see in Istanbul this enormous palace that he's constructing for himself on the outskirts of Istanbul. It's literally in the hundreds of millions of dollars, just enormous.

But again, he's an old-school-type dictator. Personally, I'm very saddened to see that this coup failed, because I think it was vital for the future progress of Turkey, for them to get him out of office. Now what he's doing is conducting a purge of the military. So any officers who might be even thought of as being disloyal or against his agenda, he's purging them, removing them from office. And purges, what tends to happen is thousands of people disappear and are never heard from again. And that will probably happen with a lot of the military leadership and any political opponents there. It's a very sad development, the last thing that part of the world needs is, frankly, another Islamic hellhole, like some of the other countries there. And that's exactly what they are, compared to the rest of the world. With those comments and in terms of background, that actually kind of sets the stage for some of the things I want to talk about today, which is, where are we now in prophecy? And today we do live in a time where, as we've seen in the news the last few weeks, just dramatic changes taking place at a pace that is just frantic. You never know what the headlines are going to be when you turn on the news at night or when you wake up in the morning and check your computers there. The world is changing at a frantic pace and things that we thought unimaginable just a few years ago are now becoming commonplace. It was only last summer, just barely over a year ago, that the U.S. Supreme Court struck down all laws banning homosexual marriage in the United States only a year ago. And now what do we see? Now we see this concerted effort, almost a fierce push, I would characterize it, to cram transgenderism down the throats of the American public.

It's just uncanny. It's just indescribable. A month or so ago, the Department of Education issued orders, you might say, a dictate that schools, every public school in the nation, must allow students to use whatever bathroom, whatever shower, whatever locker room they think they are in their minds.

If it's a boy who thinks he's a girl, he's got to be allowed to use the girls' locker room and showers and restroom and vice versa. And the threat there is if you don't do this, if you don't allow that, we're going to cut off federal funding for your schools, which would be devastating to a lot of schools.

Everywhere we look, we see these dramatic changes taking place, reshaping the world in ways that make no sense on a physical level, like the transgender issue there.

As I've said a number of times, when you see things that do not make sense on a physical level, you can pretty much be guaranteed that there is something taking place on a spiritual level that we don't discern with our physical minds. It's beyond our physical comprehension. So what does all of this mean? What do these headlines mean that we see? What do the things that we don't see in the headlines that are taking place nonetheless?

And I forward a lot of that to you. And one reason I send you out the Friday Night News items is so much of this is not reported in our U.S. mainstream media, but it's from other sources. And what do all of those things mean as well? How does all fit together in terms of Bible prophecy and where we are? Where are these trends taking us? With the major events taking place in the last few weeks, I thought this would be a good opportunity to go through and review and give kind of an overview of three broad trends, three key areas of prophecy that we should be tracking.

And this is... I kind of organize... I've never explained this, but I kind of organize the material I send you in the Friday Night updates along these three trends, usually starting with the Middle East because that's where the most is taking place, and then Europe and ending with what's happening in the United States. Sometimes I reverse the order depending on what's hot in the news. So these are our three things. I want to talk about these three key areas and a few specific prophecies that have to be fulfilled immediately before Jesus Christ returned, that kind of set the stage for that to happen.

And of course there are many, many other prophecies, but I just want to cover these three, otherwise we'd be here for many, many hours. And these also are three that we have focused on in the Church over the years. There are three trends that we talk about quite a bit in Beyond Today magazine. There are three trends, incidentally, that are covered in three of our booklets on prophecies.

So these three that I'll mention, the United States Decline is talked about in this booklet, The Rise of a New Superpower in Europe is talked about in the Book of Revelation Unveiled, and then of course the Middle East in Bible Prophecies. I'd refer you to all of these for more background. I'm just going to hit three specific prophecies here that tie in directly with the events to take place right at Jesus Christ's return. So today I want to give you an overview of these three areas, and they are the decline of the United States and Britain. And by decline I'm talking about two different areas.

One is the moral and spiritual decline, and then also the physical decline. What is happening? I'll go into some details about that as well. Then the rise of a new superpower in Europe, and then conditions in the Middle East, specifically those that lead up to a confrontation between the end-time superpower centered in Europe and forces from the Middle East.

So let's go over and look at, review some of these prophecies. We've covered these before in various venues, but I want to help us get a sense of where what we see taking place in the world is leading and why, and help us understand what's taking place behind the scenes there. And where it's all going to lead. So I'd like to start in Jeremiah 30, verses 4-7, just a short section of prophecy here. Prophetically we know that America and Britain are the primary descendants of ancient Israel, or Jacob, Jacob whose name was changed to Israel.

And this prophecy discusses Jacob's descendants, specifically in the end-time, as we will see. And it starts off, now these are the words that the Eternal spoke concerning Israel and Judah. Now keep in mind that when Jeremiah is writing these words, he's writing them during the latter period of the kingdom of Judah.

And the kingdom of Israel, the northern ten tribes, had already been taken into captivity about a century before these words are written. So Israel's already gone. They're off the scene. They've been taken away into captivity by the Assyrians. But notice here, Jeremiah says, this is what's going to happen concerning Israel and Judah. But Israel's already gone, so this is a prophecy for the end-time, and we'll see this more.

And of course, Israel in this context is talking about the modern English-speaking descendants of ancient Israel, primarily the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, New Zealand. So what is prophesied to happen to them? Let's continue with the prophecy. For thus says the Lord, we have heard a voice of trembling, of fear, and not of peace. Ask now and see, and then he gives a very graphic picture. See whether a man is ever in labor with a child. Why do I see every man with his hands on his loins like a woman in labor, and all faces turned pale?

So grown men are in anguish as a woman in labor here is what he's describing. God is describing to Jeremiah. Alas, for that day is great, so that none is like it. And it is the time of Jacob's trouble. And this is a phrase we use from time to time in our publications, the time of Jacob's trouble. And it's coming from this prophecy right here, the time of Israel's trouble, you might say.

But he shall be saved out of it. So this is a prophecy of great trouble, of great turmoil, for the descendants of Israel at the time of the end. And it is also described here as a time that there is none like it. The Bible actually has three prophecies of this time that is unparalleled in human history, a time unlike anything that has ever happened in human history up to that time, or will ever happen again. This is one of them. The others you're familiar with, Matthew 24, verses 21 and 22. This is Jesus Christ, Olivet Prophecy.

And he says, For then there shall be great tribulation, such as has not been since the beginning of the world until this time, known nor ever shall be. So it's a time unlike anything since the world began and will ever see again. And then Christ goes on to say, And unless those days of this time of great tribulation were shortened, no flesh would be saved.

But for the elect's sake, for the sake of God's people, of God's church, those days will be shortened. So he's describing a time in which if Christ did not intervene by coming, that, frankly, the human race would become extinct. That's how perilous this time will be. And the third place is over in Daniel 12, verse 1. Daniel was told, At that time, Michael shall stand up, the great prince who stands watch over the sons of your people. Michael is the archangel. And there shall be a time of trouble such as never was since there was a nation, even to that time. So we see here three different prophecies that are described as the time of Jacob or Israel's trouble.

And it's going to be a period that is unlike anything in human history where if God did not directly intervene, the result would be human extinction. So this is how serious the times are that lie ahead here.

And of course, the extinction of the human race wasn't really possible until the development of nuclear weapons near the end of World War II, about 60 years ago. And at that time, that was the first time in human history where mankind developed the capacity to literally exterminate all life on the face of the Earth. Now, since then, we've advanced. We've come up with two other ways to exterminate all life, and that is through germ warfare, biological weapons, and the poor man's nukes, which are chemical weapons, thereby which we can kill every human being on Earth.

So let's go back now to Jeremiah 30 and see a little bit more about this time of Jacob's trouble. And God says here, "'For it shall come to pass in that day that time of Jacob's trouble,' says the Lord of Host, "'that I will break his yoke from your neck, and will burst your bonds. Foreigners shall no more enslave them.'" So this is talking about a period when Israel will be enslaved. "'But they shall serve the Lord their God.'" And then here's a time marker for this. "'And David their king, whom I will raise up for them.'" And we see here that this prophecy could never have been fulfilled in ancient times because King David was dead and buried in his tomb, had been for centuries by the time this was written. So this is talking about a time after Christ's return, or leading up to, and now after Christ's return, when they will be brought out of captivity where they've been scattered, and David will be raised up and will reign over them, the resurrected David brought up in the first resurrection that Jesus Christ returned. So we do see references here to Jacob's captivity and God delivering them from that captivity at the time of Christ's return. And God also says that this will be his divine correction and punishment on the descendants of Jacob. There are many, many, many other prophecies that make these same basic points that we don't have time to go into. So I'm just using this one because it is so specific as to what is prophesied to happen to the descendants of Jacob at the time of the end.

So an obvious question then is, could this really be fulfilled? I mean, the United States right now is the most powerful nation on the face of the earth, more wealth than probably any nation in the history of the human race. Could it really fall? Could there really be a time of Jacob's trouble where it falls into such calamitous circumstances that its people are taken captive there, where the nation is destroyed, doesn't exist for all intents and purposes? Is that possible? Well, a way to answer that would be to say, do we have precedents for that, for empires that fall in the human race? Well, actually, we're probably quite familiar with at least three of them.

Here, at the outbreak of World War II, the British Empire was the—and I see I woke up Arthur here, so we'll talk about the British Empire here for a little bit, but the British— American? American, okay. You've come up in the world, Arthur.

But the British Empire was the strongest empire in human history. It literally was the empire on which the sun never set, because it ruled territory around the world. The sun never set on the British territories and possessions and dominions and so on.

But in just over a decade, that empire collapsed and was no more. Britain lost a lot of its overseas possessions. Major areas like India, Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan, Israel—Israel didn't exist then, but that land, many of its possessions in Africa, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, places like that. Britain became, within a decade, a second, almost a third, great power in the world.

Britain had helped win World War II, contributing an enormous amount of sacrifice, blood, and treasure for that.

But by the time the war ended, the strain was simply too much. Britain was exhausted. It had lost so much in terms of manpower and resources and wealth to keep the world free that it lost its empire. That was the price that they paid for it. Britain was simply exhausted and could not continue. It's kind of odd to think of a nation becoming exhausted, but that's what happened to Britain there.

Its economic strength was spent, and it has recovered considerably since then. But again, today it's, at best, a second-rate power, compared to the major powers of the world, maybe even a third-rate power. There is a term for this—you've probably read it at times—called imperial overreach. In other words, a power an empire can stretch itself so thin that it can no longer sustain all of that.

It happened to the Roman Empire. We're familiar with that story. It happened to the British Empire. It happened to the Russian, the Soviet Empire, a couple of decades ago. And now it is happening before our eyes to the American Empire. We simply cannot afford everything that we need to do, much less all that we want to do around the world.

And we appear to be reaching the breaking point in a number of crucial, critical areas to our future.

It's most obvious—I want to talk about two areas here. One is the U.S. Armed Forces, the U.S. military, which, although the world is growing more crazy by the day, more dangerous by the day, our U.S. military is shrinking dramatically.

Since World War II, the U.S.—yeah, since World War II, the U.S. military strategy for determining how many personnel, how many ships, how many planes, how many tanks we need, was based on the idea that we be able to fight two major wars simultaneously in different parts of the world. That was our military doctrine at the end of World War II.

And we saw this in Korea, we saw it in Vietnam, other areas there.

The United States has officially abandoned that doctrine as of several years ago.

We simply could not sustain that capability. It's questionable, frankly, whether we have the capability to fight even one major war.

As we've seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, we could not sustain those two wars, even though they're very close geographically, could not sustain those two wars simultaneously. We just did not have the military strength or the political will to do so.

And we, as the old saying goes, if you can't win, you declare victory and pack up and go home. And that's essentially what we've done in those two areas.

Let me give you a few numbers here.

The United States Army is shrinking from 570,000 troops staffing level during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to 450,000 this budget year, this fiscal year.

That is the smallest number since World War II.

The smallest number since World War II.

The U.S. Navy, and I found this shocking, currently has 272 ships, the fewest since 1916.

That was before the United States entered World War I.

So it's been a century since we have had this, this is the fewest number of ships we've had in a century.

The U.S. Air Force has the fewest aircraft since it split off right after a year or two after World War II ended.

The Air Force split off before that it was under the Army.

We now have the fewest aircraft in almost 50 years ago when the Air Force was started.

This is quite shocking. I did some research and at several military bases, fewer than half of the aircraft can even fly.

Because they don't have the parts to keep them flying safely.

It's so desperate that they have actually had to go to aircraft and museums and steal parts of them to put in our aircraft so they can fly.

I read this specifically about a bomber base and a fighter base, both in the Midwest. In both cases, fewer than half of the aircraft on the base could even fly.

That's not counting the fewest aircraft since that time.

They're short. I believe the figure was about 3,000 pilots and several times that many ground support staff.

The mechanics, the people who keep the planes repaired and flying and all of that. Part of this is part of the U.S. budget process.

It's just incredible how little the American public is aware of how dangerously thin our military is.

On top of that, the fourth point I put here is that the military is increasingly used for social experimentation.

Instead of doing its job of defending the country. What do I mean by that?

Several years ago, rules were passed that homosexuals could serve openly in the United States military.

One of our members, after the sermon in Denver this morning, he had done some work out at Buckley Air Force Base on the east side of Denver.

He was there doing some maintenance and work around there.

The base was commanded by a colonel who was a lesbian woman who lived on base with her wife.

This is what passes for leadership in base commanders these days.

Just a week or two ago, another rule was passed that transgenders can serve openly in the US military.

As I say, what could possibly go wrong with that kind of thinking there?

The stated reason is why we want to make sure that we get the best qualified people to serve in our military.

Well, I'm sorry, your standards are not very high, if that's the best you can get.

Trying to get mentally ill people serving in positions of command in your military. It's just crazy.

Meanwhile, what we've been doing, what I described in Turkey, is that generals, admirals, and colonels who don't go along with the social agenda are being pushed out.

They are forced into retirement because they don't go along with this.

They can see you in the direction it's taking the military in terms of morale, in terms of military preparedness, and so on.

They disagree, so they're being forced out of the military.

The only officers left will be those who support this kind of nonsense here.

Of course, this is all lowering the morale of the military and lowering the standards as well. Another factor is women in combat roles.

I had another article I meant to include in last night's update, overlooked it, but it was from a British general who said all this stuff about putting women into combat roles is absolute nonsense.

All you're going to do is create more and more casualties among the women themselves because they're not capable of moving as fast as carrying the type of combat loads in terms of weaponry, ammunition, and water, and food as the men.

The men are going to have to slow down to take care of the women. The bottom line is you're going to get more people killed on your side. It's just insane thinking.

Another area I want to talk about here briefly in terms of U.S. decline is the U.S. economy.

If I could sum it up in three words, it's drowning in debt.

Our national debt is now over $19 trillion.

How much is a trillion?

Well, if you tried to count, it would take you many, many lifetimes to count it.

Here's an interesting illustration that I could fit simply on a slide.

If $19 trillion bills were stacked, one on another, on top of each other, they would stretch from the earth to the moon five and a half times.

Five and a half times. That's how much $19 trillion is.

The share of that debt for each person sitting in this room is almost $60,000.

That's your share of the debt, every one of you here.

Well, not every one of you here, because some of you are students and don't work yet.

Some of you are retired and don't work. Some of you are too young to work and don't work.

For those of you who are actually paying taxes, well, bad news. Your share is just over $161,000 if you're a taxpayer.

Sundown is at $8.28 this evening, so set your clock and go to work.

You've got a lot to make up here.

That's the reality of our debt situation here.

What's really sad is that about half of that debt has been added in only the last eight years. In the last eight years, we've accumulated as much debt as we have in the previous 200 years, which included a couple of World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, and all the social spending and so on that's led up to the last eight years.

A few other things. I don't have this on a slide, but a little over two decades ago, the United States was the richest and greatest lending nation on Earth. We were kind of the bank for the entire world. We loaned money to everyone.

Now, just two decades later, we are the biggest debtor nation, not just in the world, but in all of human history.

Two decades. That's how dramatic the turnaround has been.

Just over a decade ago, the United States was the breadbasket of the world. We shipped grain, we shipped corn, wheat, barley, soybeans, things like this all over the world.

About a decade ago, we became a net importer of food. We now import more food than we export, which is staggering when you consider the productivity of our farms and ranches and so on.

How fast things change.

Our U.S. debt is being financed primarily by China. They sell us TVs and electronics and computers and computer games.

They take that money and buy government bonds or debt.

Eventually, the government will need to pay that off to those other nations.

But what will happen if we stop buying our debt?

We can't run these incredible deficits that we've been doing for years now.

What will happen if they switch from dollars to euros or to the Chinese currency or something like that? Well, then the U.S. economy is going to be in serious trouble because the spending spree will screech to a halt because nobody will buy our debt anymore.

In essence, nobody will lend us any more money.

What happens then?

Well, we've seen what happens in previous history when the economy implodes on a small level. We saw this in Hurricane Katrina. Some of you may remember watching that on TV 11 years ago.

And what happened? The hurricane came through, the power went down.

When the power went down, it goes down. You can't get gas anymore because you don't have a way to pump gas up out of the underground tanks to fuel your cars. Your power goes out, your lights go out, your heat, your water goes out. There's no more clean water to drink. The food that you have in your refrigerator starts to spoil.

The food in your freezer starts to rot and decay.

As we saw in Hurricane Katrina, within a matter of hours, people started rampaging through the stores, looting, stealing guns, forming armed gangs, and roaming the streets.

A friend of mine, Scott Moss, who's spoken here a few times in the past, has a saying that we're only three days from the jungle.

What does that mean? Well, it means that the shorthand for each family has about three days' worth of food in their house.

When that food runs out and people start getting very hungry, they will do anything to get more food to keep themselves alive.

And what happens then is the law of the jungle prevails. And those who are the biggest and the strongest and the meanest and the most heavily armed are the ones who survive.

And to heck with everybody else.

We saw that proven in New Orleans and in other similar circumstances around the world. That's a taste of what lies ahead when societal order breaks down.

Well, one could bring something like this about. Well, nobody's going to, even though I talked about our military decline, but nobody wants to commit suicide. So no other nation is going to take us on head to head militarily right now. The United States is still the biggest, strongest, baddest military in the world. So they want to attack us in other ways, as we've seen historically.

Few people realize this. I've talked about it before several years ago in one of my messages about Islam. But the 9-11 attacks were designed to bring down the entire country in one day.

In one day. Just to refresh our memories, it's been quite a while now. But 9-11, there were four jets that were hijacked. Two of them went into the World Trade Center.

One of them went into the Pentagon. And one went down in a field in Pennsylvania. It was making a beeline from its original course back to Washington, D.C., when apparently the passengers overpowered the hijackers and the plane went down in a field.

Several months or a year or so later, the CIA and Pakistani Secret Service captured an individual here. A nice cherry-looking fellow by the name of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. He was a right-hand aide to Osama bin Laden and was one of the architects of the 9-11 attacks. So they did what the CIA does best, and they took him down into the basement and waterboarded him. And you'll hear things that waterboarding doesn't produce useful intelligence. Well, they don't know what they're talking about because he started singing like a canary and laid out what the whole plan was.

And the original plan was to take about 20 jets, to hijack about 20 jets, and fly them not only into the World Trade Center, not only into the Pentagon, but also into the U.S. Capitol Building, when Congress is in session, into the White House to take out the President and Vice President and his staff to take out the Pentagon, fly another jet into CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and to hit other major landmarks like the Sears Tower in Chicago, other skyscrapers in L.A., Dallas, Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia, places like that, with the goal of decapitating the government leadership of the country, the President, Vice President, both houses of Congress, taking out the military leadership of the Pentagon, taking out the intelligence leadership of the CIA, taking out the economic leadership of the World Trade Center, Wall Street, other places like the Sears Tower, and bring down the entire nation in one day.

Of course, they weren't successful at that, primarily because of what the CIA learned from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. One of the things he said is, you know, we were counting on having several more months, or maybe another year, to get more hijackers smuggled into the U.S. and trained to fly these 20 planes. But we got wind that some of our people were being trailed, some of our communications were being intercepted, so we had to move up our plans and go with what we had on the ground in the United States.

And that was enough to hijack four planes, which again hit the world. The Twin Towers hit the Pentagon. And he also said that one of the targets was the U.S. Capitol, and apparently the hijackers and the jet that hit the Pentagon flying at a low altitude weren't able to recognize the U.S.

Capitol, but they did recognize the Pentagon, so they changed and hit the Pentagon instead. And then there's the fourth jet that went down in Pennsylvania. And we don't know where it was, what its designated target was. Perhaps it was designated to hit the Pentagon or CIA headquarters or something like that. So that's what the plan was. And again, the timetable was sped up, or that might have happened, and taken down the entire country at one time.

It's a very, very sobering situation there. Could that plan have worked? Well, obviously it was successful in ways that, considering only four jets, wildly successful. The U.S. stock market lost a trillion dollars that they vanished. What they did, they managed to pull off, stun the entire world.

Could they do something like that again? Well, believe me, they're trying. They're continually trying. I've read books from a number of authors who say that for years Al-Qaeda has been trying to acquire nuclear weapons, either from the Soviet arsenal or Ukraine or places like that, some of the Soviet republics that broke away. Al-Qaeda was working on an active nuclear program in Afghanistan, of all places. There are other things I've read I haven't been able to verify, but imagine what would happen if Al-Qaeda was able to smuggle something into the United States and set off a nuke in Washington, D.C., or New York, or Chicago, or L.A., or someplace like that.

What that would do to the country and what it would do to our economy. It would probably send us overnight into another Great Depression, like from the 1930s. I might comment here, too. We read so much in the news about so many people coming across our southern border with Mexico, but actually one intelligence expert that I read, a former U.S. prosecutor, I believe, he actually said that the biggest border issue is not the Mexican border, it's the Canadian border.

Because the border there is so wide open, because Canada and the United States have such friendly relations that there are places where there's logging roads through the woods that you can drive through in the middle of the night and there won't be anybody at the border to stop you. Roads out in the prairie provinces and so on, where you can cross between the borders with nobody to stop and inspect your vehicle and things like that. So he said that is really the border that is the greatest danger to the United States.

And some of the articles I've sent you over the years have shown how border agents along the Mexican border have recovered prayer rugs and copies of the Koran and Arabic letters and so on from people who are obviously from Muslims who are crossing the border illegally here. So a lot to consider, a lot of very sobering, a lot of very frightening possibilities there where the United States could literally be brought down in a day. What about being taken into captivity, as some of the prophecies describe? Well, I'd always puzzled about that and wonder about that, but Tom Robinson and I were having a conversation a couple of years ago and he said, well, what happens when a nation has a big disaster?

Well, they send in a lot of people to help. They're called peacekeepers and UN help and so on. They come in, but what if the United States experiences a disaster like that and other countries came in and send in their military to help us? But they're not there to help. I don't know, a possibility, something to think about there. Of course, back years ago it used to be just Al-Qaeda that we had to worry about and now there's also the Islamic State, there's Hezbollah, there's Islamic Jihad, there's Boko Haram and various other terrorist groups, some which we probably haven't even heard of yet because they spring up like weeds these days.

And that's certainly not the only way the nation could be brought down quickly, although it's one of the fastest. There are two chapters in the Bible, Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28, they're the blessings and cursings chapters, that list the blessings that would come on Israel's descendants if they would be obedient to God and obey His laws. And then there are also the flip side, the curses that would come if they rejected those laws. I'd like to read just a few verses out of Leviticus 26, I don't have time to cover the whole chapter, or it would be here all week, but God warns the Israelites in Leviticus 26 verses 14-17, He says, If you do not obey Me and do not observe all these commandments, and if you despise My statutes, or if your soul abhors My judgments, so that you do not perform all My commandments, but break My covenant, I also will do this to you.

I will even appoint terror over you. Terror over you. That really jumped out at me a couple of years ago, you know, in the ancient, the time of the ancient Israelites, the concept of terror had no meaning to them, yet we see it in our headlines every day now. Interesting, that choice of words. Wasting disease and fever which shall consume the eyes, it calls sorrow apart. A lot of the articles I send to you concern germs that are becoming antibiotic resistant.

Interestingly, sexually transmissible diseases are one of my most... I saw an article just yesterday. There's a new strain of gonorrhea that is resistant to virtually everything we can throw in it.

There are diseases that used to... decades ago were eradicated here in the United States, like measles, like tuberculosis.

And now they're making a resurgence because our government is bringing in thousands and thousands of people from Africa, from North Africa, from Afghanistan, from Iraq, from Syria, where those diseases are still commonplace there. And we're importing deadly diseases and moving people into communities all over the country with these diseases.

15 or 20 here in Colorado have been diagnosed with active tuberculosis.

It's insane. Again, as I said earlier, when things make no sense, on a physical level, you can be sure there is something spiritual going on.

It's insane what is going on in our country. Continuing on here.

Again, the United States is now becoming a net importer of food. We're still shipping wheat, corn, barley overseas, but we're importing more food than we're exporting.

Verse 17, he says, Why has the United States lost so much of its standing in the world in recent years?

Why do our enemies no longer fear us but actively mock us? North Korea, a little pipsqueak nation that can't even feed its own people, and yet they're threatening to nuke us.

Continually insulting us, threatening us, that sort of thing.

It's interesting, President Obama visited Cuba a couple of months ago, and within a week or so after he got back, Fidel Castro, one of the world's great has-beens, started popping off and insulting President Obama.

Why do they feel free to do things, to threaten and insult the United States? It's because they no longer fear us. We're paper tiger, and they know it.

I talked earlier about our military, and in spite of its massive reductions, America still possesses the world's most advanced and powerful military capabilities. And yet, since World War II, we have not won a major war.

Korean War was a stalemate. Vietnam, we declared victory and packed up and went home. Iraq, same thing, declared victory and went home. Afghanistan, we're going to drop down to about 2,000 troops, I think, for the next few years there. Essentially declared victory and went home. We did not win against countries that, you know, guerrilla movements, people, their most advanced weapons are AK-47s and IEDs. That kind of thing. America still is a great power, but it just no longer uses that power for victory, for winning, for reasons of fear or guilt or political correctness, or just because we no longer believe in the rightness of our cause. And none of this, again, makes sense until you realize there are powerful spiritual forces at work around the world.

One of the more interesting phrases used in these chapters, I'm going to switch over now from Leviticus 26 and read one verse out of Deuteronomy 28.

And God says here that if you continue to disobey me and so on, you shall be troublesome to all the kingdoms of the earth. And to me, this is one of the most staggering developments in the world seen over the last decade, and really only in the last three or four years, how the entire world is aligning itself against the Israelite nations, the descendants of Israel.

Think about that. There are all these bizarre alliances. For decades, Russia and China have been at each other's throats there, out of competition with one another, and yet now they're becoming friends again. We have nations like North Korea, the communist atheists, and yet they're allying themselves with Muslim countries like Iran and Pakistan.

And then we have Russia, which is officially quasi-communist atheists, and yet they're selling a nuclear plant and their advanced missile systems and submarines to Muslim Iran, and all of this. And all of this just makes no sense again. These people ought to be at each other's throats, and yet they're allying themselves against the modern descendants of Israel.

They all have one thing in common. They're coming together not against the bad guys, but against the good guys, the people who aren't a threat to the rest of the world, namely the descendants of Israel. So why does God say that our nations are going to be punished in this way? God set up ancient Israel and told them, you're to be a model nation. You're to be a nation that shows what kind of blessings will come when you obey me, when you live according to my laws. You're to be an example to all the other nations. And unfortunately today we are an example, all right, but an example of what? Isaiah 3, verse 9, says of us that they declare their sin as Sodom. They don't even hide it.

In other words, we have no more sense of shame as a people, as a nation, things that were incomprehensible a generation ago. You see on TV, you see it's celebrated on TV and music and movies and so on. I'd like to go through a few points just to consider how the moral climate has changed in the last generation or so.

Three presidential administrations ago, we had a U.S. president being sexually gratified by an intern in the Oval Office.

The most powerful position in the world, and he's using it to be sexually gratified by a woman half his age.

We had congressmen and governors who have resigned or lost office because of affairs, some with women, some with men.

We now have open homosexuals serving in government on many levels. I think the statistics I read earlier this week were accurate. We have six ambassadors who are homosexual, representing what our government believes to the rest of the world. We have all these homosexual outreach events, celebrating transgender days at our embassies around the world. This is what our government presents to the rest of the world as the values that we consider important.

One homosexual man was even appointed to be the ambassador to the Vatican, if you can imagine that.

And the Vatican said, hell no, we're not going to accept him.

This is the kind of values we are trying to force around the rest of the world.

Consider our entertainment, what we see on TV, disgusting reality shows, programming that forces gay characters, transgender characters down the throats of America, the trash's families, trash's traditional morality that portrays fathers as idiots and morons, and makes them the butt of jokes, movies that are drenched in gore and violence, music, especially rap music, that is just utterly obscene and degrading, celebrating sex and violence and all this sort of stuff. We idolize celebrities who have affairs, and babies out of wedlock and who live together, all kinds of things like that. This is what our people are filling their minds with these days. And of course, this has an impact on our national behavior.

A few statistics about the illegitimacy rate in the United States. In the early 1950s, only 4% of U.S. births were out of wedlock. It's early 1950s, that's when I was born. Connie wasn't born until the 80s, but I was born in the 50s. Only 1 out of 25 births was illegitimate in the early 50s, 1 out of 25.

By 1988, basically a generation later, it had reached 25% from 1 in 25 to 1 in 4 births were illegitimate. As of the most recent statistics two years ago, 40% of all births are illegitimate.

That's 2 out of 5 are illegitimate. Among some minority groups, it's approaching 80% of births are illegitimate.

And what are the two greatest contributors to poverty and crime? Well, it's the same basic contributor, but to the predictability of somebody becoming a criminal or having a criminal history or being in poverty. Well, it's not having a father in the home or coming from a broken home, not having a father there. That's the greatest single predictor that somebody will spend time in prison or that will grow up and live in poverty themselves and perpetuate that cycle. We see these cycles that perpetuate themselves. It's just staggering how much that has changed. In recent years, court decisions have legalized sodomy and same-sex marriage throughout the country. At the same time, court decisions have banned display of the Ten Commandments and threatened to remove under God, one nation under God, from our Pledge of Allegiance. We're witnessing, again, I send you a lot of articles on this, systematic hostility toward Christian values among the courts and legal offices and so on, governmental offices.

We see people who won't provide services for a homosexual marriage, photographers, wedding cake bakers, people who rent out venues for weddings, and they're being sued out of existence for refusing to accept and go along with the gay marriages there.

In at least one case, a business owner couple up in the Pacific Northwest ordered to undergo government brainwashing to get their thinking right. Because obviously, you can't be thinking right if you're refusing to provide these services for a gay marriage. And therefore, you must undergo these hours of reprogramming.

They're just getting ridiculous here. And we're also seeing incredible growing ignorance of the Bible.

One Gallup poll found that only half of Americans could name one of the four Gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, only half of Americans could name one of them.

Only one person in four could name even half of the Ten Commandments.

Hopefully we have those memorized, but only one person in four can name even half of those.

Another survey found that half of professing Christians thought that living together, or having sexual thoughts with somebody who's not your spouse, was morally acceptable.

Another survey found that a third of professing Christians thought that adultery, pornography, drunkenness, and having an abortion were morally acceptable. A third of Christians thought that. So just about any moral measure you want to use. Divorce rates, adultery rates, rates of living together, teen sex, drug use, content of popular entertainment, anything you want to use, goes these days. We've had almost 60 million abortions since abortion was legalized in the United States. And now we see, as some of the videos that were released several months ago, that abortions performed to sell off body parts of babies to be sold hundreds of dollars per part, murdering the unborn for profit.

I could go on and on, but these are just some of the examples, a short list of some of the huge changes we've seen in the last generation.

We are an example of a nation greatly blessed by God, but then turning around and essentially spitting in God's face.

Another passage is very pertinent right now, Isaiah 5, verse 20. Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. And we're seeing plenty of that in the news these days, even from our government, saying, no, this evil is actually good. This is the way the country ought to go. This is what you all ought to get behind us in support. And because of that, God says that He's going to make an example of us to the rest of the world, but not in a good way.

I'd like to switch gears now, and I won't spend as much time on the other two areas as is talking basically about the state of the United States. Well, let's move now to Europe, and these latter two won't take nearly as much time. But what about developments in Europe? We saw something very dramatic a couple of weeks ago with the Brexit, the vote from Britain to exit the European Union. And we've taught for years, understood for years, that a new superpower would emerge out of Europe. And this would be a final resurrection of the Roman Empire. And I don't have time to go through all of the history, but I would like to touch on two prophecies that tell us, and this is where we get that particular understanding from.

First, in Revelation 17, and I'll read part of this, verses 1 through 14, excerpts from this. Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and talked with me, saying to me, this is John relating what he saw in vision, Come, I will show you the judgment of the great harlot who sits on many waters, with whom the kings of the earth committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth were made drunk with the wine of her fornication.

And he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness. I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast, which was full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. The woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet, 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.

And on her forehead a name was written, Mystery Babylon the Great, the mother of harlots and the abominations of the earth. And then skipping down to verse 12, then an angel explains what this vision meant to John. And he says, the ten horns, which you saw, are ten kings who have received no kingdom as yet, but they receive authority for one hour, a very short period of time, not literally one hour, but this is talking figuratively of a very short time, as kings with the beast.

These are of one mind, and they will give their power and authority to the beast. These will make war with the lamb, so we see the time element here. They will make war, they will fight Jesus Christ at His return. And the lamb will overcome them, for He is Lord of lords and King of kings. And those who are with Him, talking about those of us here, who will look at the saints, who will accompany Him at His return, are called and chosen and faithful. So here is a graphic representation of an artist's conception of this, the woman, clad in scarlet and purple, writing this seven-headed beast, and the beast with ten horns.

What's up with the seven heads? Well, this is actually a composite of prophecies from the book of Daniel, which we don't have time to go into, but Daniel saw four beasts with a total of seven heads, representing Babylon, the Medo-Persian Empire, the Greek Empire of Alexander the Great, a leopard that had four heads, and then finally a beast unlike any of the others that represented the Roman Empire.

So these are the same seven heads here, and the ten horns here, which are identified as the ten leaders or rulers or kings, as it's worded here, who will give their power over to this beast here that will fight Jesus Christ at his return. So let's turn back now and look at a prophecy in Daniel. This is the prophecy of the huge statuary image that Nebuchadnezzar saw and had Daniel interpret. So Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar have described the vision, and then Daniel starts to interpret it, and he says, this is the dream, now we will tell the interpretation of it before the king.

So Daniel is talking to Nebuchadnezzar, explaining what the dream meant, this very strange dream. And he says, you, O king, are a king of kings. You are this head of gold. But after you, after Babylon, will arise another kingdom inferior to yours, then another, a third kingdom of bronze, which shall rule over all the earth. All the earth here literally doesn't mean the entire world. It's talking about the known world or the civilized world of that time, which stretch basically from Babylon over to Greece and Egypt there.

And the fourth kingdom, another kingdom, shall be as strong as iron. And as much as iron breaks in pieces and shatters everything. And like iron that crushes, that kingdom will break in pieces and crush all the others. Whereas you saw the feet and toes, partly of potter's clay and partly of iron, the kingdom shall be divided. Yet the strength of the iron shall be in it, just as you saw the iron mixed with ceramic clay.

And as the toes of the feet were partly of iron and partly of clay, so shall the kingdom be partly strong and partly fragile. As you saw iron mixed with ceramic clay, they will mingle with the seed of men, but they will not adhere to one another, just as iron does not mix with clay.

And in the days of these kings, the ten tobus, they're representing these kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed. And the kingdom shall not be left to other people. It shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand forever. And here's a graphic representation of that. We see the head of gold representing the Babylonian Empire, the chest and arms of silver representing the two aspects of the Medo-Persian Empire, two arms representing one representing Medes, the other Persians, the belly and thighs of bronze or brass representing Alexander the Great's Empire, and then finally the two legs of iron representing the Roman Empire, ending with the ten toes of iron mixed with clay that do not mix together.

They're not strong at that point. The legs themselves are very strong, made of iron, the strongest material known at that time. Notice also, just as the two arms represented the Medes and the Persians, we have the two legs, if you studied your Roman Empire history, representing the Eastern Roman Empire and the Western Roman Empire. The Western Roman Empire existed for approximately a thousand years, headquartered in Rome.

And then the Eastern Roman Empire, which existed in Constantinople, is centered there for approximately a thousand years as well. So the image is so detailed as to even predict those two aspects of those two empires as well.

And then, of course, after that, what happens? It is struck by a stone from heaven, representing Jesus Christ, returning, destroying these empires of man, and establishing a new kingdom that will fill the earth and will last forever, the kingdom of God. So here is where we get our teaching and our understanding of the end-time prophecies and a union of ten nations or rulers or leaders who come together for a short time, a short time indicating a crisis situation that brings them together. And this exists and fights Jesus Christ at His return. So this is the framework, not all the details, but the framework for where we get our understanding of what will happen.

It is indicated by these two prophecies. So we have long understood and taught that this empire will be centered in the lands of the ancient Roman Empire there, which of course was centered at that time when John saw this vision in Rome, in Italy. There and again, it later transitioned into Eastern and Western Roman Empire. So we understand from this there will be a revival of the Roman Empire.

That sounds kind of absurd. You mentioned that to people today. They kind of think that's crazy. But as explained, actually we're working on two booklets about this that go through the different resurrections of the Roman Empire, which we don't have time to go into today. But it goes through how this dream of a Roman Empire still lives very much in Europe. Several months ago I showed you this video that we saw in a movie in Rome of this woman representing Europe going back to searching for her roots. Where did I come from? And going back to Augustus, the first Roman emperor. And so on. It shows, it encapsulates the thinking.

Europe searching for its identity there. So we have seen this process steadily. It worked since the mid-1950s there. What is the status of that unification effort? Well, as we saw the news with the Brexit vote, Britain voted to leave to get out of there, which is something we thought long would happen, as being of Israelite origin. We did not think they would be a part of the final beast power. And it looks like other nations are poised to leave. Just in the articles I sent you last night, there was one about Italy wanting to leave, another about France wanting to leave.

Somebody told me after the sermon this morning that Germany itself is thinking about leaving the European Union. So what has happened is the European Union is expanding to 28 nations, has just become so big and so unwieldy that they can't get anything done.

And that's a big part of the problem. They can't get everybody to agree on foreign policy, on military policy, on economic policy and all that, because you've got 28 people, you're trying to get to agree on everything, and it just doesn't happen. So that's the problem. And I think the EU is probably going to unravel within the next few months or coming years here. And then probably what we will see coming out of that is something like what we've seen in these prophecies, a slimmed-down version of a European Union.

Slimming down and shedding some of these peripheral countries that are obstacles to European Union unity would allow a new organization to come together quite quickly, quite efficiently, and with much more strength and unity than what we've seen in the European Union for the last few years. Let's consider a few facts just as kind of a baseline. Where is the European Union right now? Assuming a new organization comes along, what baseline would they start with? How would that compare to the United States? You know, we don't know much at all about the European Union.

It's hardly ever talked about in our media here. But consider some of the things they have in common with us, you might say. They have a common currency, the euro, that's been in use for a number of years now. In terms of government, well, what are our branches of government? We have a president, so does the European Union. It rotates among the 28 members. It has a Senate, which they call the Council of Ministers. It has a House of Representatives called the European Parliament. It has a Supreme Court. Didn't get the name of that. They are trying to establish a common foreign policy. And as of the last few weeks, they've been talking about creating a common military force led by Germany.

So this is kind of the baseline in terms of a new organization starting. They've already got things set up for common currency. The euro, a president, a Supreme Court, a Senate, a House of Representatives. They have those institutions. They've had them functioning for years. Let's ask another question here. In times of crisis, what happens?

In times of crisis, people generally do one of two things. They either come together more tightly. We saw that after 9-11 here in the United States. Or they split apart in fragment more and more. Is Europe in crisis right now? Absolutely it is. Absolutely it is. It's struggling for its identity. It's struggling economically. We've read over the last few years the Greek debt crisis. Greece is probably the most prominent one, but Portugal, Spain, Italy, very similar situations. Enormous debt, like the figures I gave you for the United States earlier here. It's struggling with the huge influx of Muslim migrants coming into the countries.

It's struggling with what to do about Russia, its neighbor to the east. Russia has gobbled up parts of Ukraine and is threatening Eastern Europe there. As a result of these things, right-wing movements are springing up. You might call them neo-Nazi parties. Springing up in various countries and gaining more and more political power because they realize that things don't change. The Europe that we have known our entire lives is not going to exist.

In a few more years, it's that serious for them. Frankly, this sounds like the type of crisis that could bring a people together, especially a core group of nations, as prophesied here in these prophecies we've been looking at here, and a one-person rule bringing stability, bringing European identity. If you think back to Germany in the years leading up to World War II, Germany was an absolute basket case.

Its economy was destroyed, crippled by the sanctions from World War I. Inflation was incredibly high. People were literally taking wheelbarrows full of money to go to a bakery and buy a loaf of bread. Imagine taking a wheelbarrow full of dollar bills to go down to the 7-11 and buy a carton of eggs or a gallon of milk or a loaf of bread. That's what was going on in Germany. Before somebody stepped in and said, I can make it all better, I can make it all work again. And he did. His name was Adolf Hitler. So it's conditions of crisis that lead to the creation of a strong man and bring people together for a short time like that.

So frankly, I think it is this kind of problems that Europeans are facing that create the kind of stressful conditions that can lead to a situation like that. So in brief, when it comes to European unification, on the one hand it looks like it's splitting apart.

And it is, and it's probably going to do so more in the coming months and years as it sheds countries or as the EU dissolves altogether and something else emerges out of its place. But ultimately, unification is moving forward, not backward. It's shedding those who are a hindrance or a barrier to European unity and moving more toward a core group of nations. Incidentally, why did Europe create the Euro? Why did the EU come up with that? Well, he did as a competitor to the US dollar, frankly.

Why did they create the EU? Well, two reasons. One is to bring peace to the continent, but also to compete with the United States as another superpower. At that time, they were dealing with two superpowers, the Soviet Union to their East, America to their West. And they didn't want to get squeezed out, so they said, okay, we'll become our own superpower. And now they're still trying to do that. So these are the types of circumstances by which we see extraordinary geopolitical solutions start to come out of chaos and confusion there. It's also true that Europe as a whole is very irreligious right now.

But what do the prophecies say about the false prophet and the beast and so on? They're going to be working miracles. And if you want to see people unite behind a religion in a hurry, one thing you can certainly do that is somebody comes along performing miracles. And the Bible says they're miracles, not faith. But there's the power of Satan and demons at work there.

So you can also say that this aspect of prophecy could come together quite quickly as well. So now let's take a look at the third major area of prophecy, and that is the Middle East. And as the Church has said for years, the Middle East is the center, it's the focal point of Bible prophecy. And it continues to grab the headlines there. We see ongoing wars there, the most notable of which is ISIS, the Islamic State. They're in Syria and Iraq. There's also the ongoing war in Afghanistan, another war in Libya, civil war taking place there.

But there's another and less obvious war taking place, and that is an ideological war for the future of Islam. Because Islam, we see this being played out in Iraq and Syria, where Islam, since the fall of the Ottoman Empire a hundred years ago, has basically been divided between those who are kind of a let live and let live situation, and those who want to restore Islam to its true roots of Mohammed and conquering the world in Jihad. And this is what I mean by an ideological war for the future of Islam.

They want to take Islam back to its glory days of conquest. If you want to understand what they want, you might think back, those of you who are old enough to remember, to the Iranian Revolution in 1979, which installed Ayatollah Khomeini as the head of Iran. And it went from a westernized secular society to the world's foremost exporter of terrorism, just within the matter of a few months here. And this is what they want the entire world to look like. Not just the Middle East, but the entire world. If you want to know what they want it to look like, look at Iran, look at what's going on in the Islamic State, where they're actively enforcing Sharia law.

They clearly see themselves as at war against western civilization, and their goal is nothing less than the overthrow of western civilization. This is why they say again and again that America is the Great Satan.

What does Satan mean? That means adversary. America is the Great Adversary. The adversary to what? The adversary to Islam fulfilling its destiny as the world-ruling religion here. So therefore, the United States must be brought down for Islam to succeed. And this is the thinking that was precisely behind the 9-11 attacks and the ongoing terror attacks against the West. So what have been the recent trends we've seen in the Middle East? Well, for decades now we've seen a massive transfer of wealth from the United States, from Europe, from Japan, from other countries to the Middle East in exchange for oil. We've given them our dollars, our pounds, our lira, our marks, our yen, and so on for oil, which they have used to support terrorism, to develop weapons of mass destruction, chemical warfare, biological warfare. There are things like the Iranian nuclear program ongoing right now. You may not realize it, but one of the most shaky regimes in the world is Pakistan. Pakistan has about 100 nukes, according to the most recent information I've been able to read. Leaders in Pakistan walk a very fine line between supporting the United States and Afghanistan, which is Pakistan's next-door neighbor, and there are people who, a lot of them, support al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Pakistan's version of the CIA, many of its officers, agents, support al-Qaeda. Why do you think Osama bin Laden was able to hide out in Pakistan in pretty much plain sight, just a mile or two from a military training academy? Osama bin Laden is hiding out for years in Pakistan. Why? Well, it's because they have a lot of sympathizers in the Pakistani intelligence who are sympathetic to al-Qaeda and ISIS and groups like that.

If the government in Pakistan were to be overthrown, there would be about 100 nukes on the worldwide terror market at that point, available to terror groups like al-Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, and others there. And if you've been following the news, of course you're aware of Iran's attempts to develop nuclear weapons and the technology to deliver them.

So potentially, looking at the state of the world and the unsettled nature of the Middle East, and certainly the events in Turkey that I've talked about don't contribute to the stability of that area at all. In anywhere from a few months, if Pakistan fell anywhere from a few months to a few years, we could have a number of nukes loose on the terrorist market out there.

Iran already has missiles that can reach most of Europe. Iran is also the world's foremost sponsor of terrorism. And if they are successful at developing nukes, which they certainly will be at the expiration of the Iranian agreement in another nine years, are some of those nukes going to go to terrorist groups? Absolutely they are. No question about it. So where are these trends heading?

How does it tie into Bible prophecy? One passage I want to read here, Daniel 11 and verse 40. This is one verse out of a long, centuries-long prophecy covered in Daniel 11. But I mention this because of the time marker that's here. At the time of the end, the king of the south shall attack him, referring to the king of the north, the European superpower I just talked about. And the king of the north shall come against him like a whirlwind with chariots, horsemen, and with many ships, and he shall enter the countries, overwhelm them, and pass through.

Elsewhere in the prophecy it describes the countries. He invades Egypt. He invades Libya. He invades Ethiopia and Sudan, and then crosses over into the Holy Land and invades Israel, but does not invade Jordan there. I want to draw our attention to this word translated, attack, here. There are several Hebrew words that do mean attack in the sense of a military force. You attack a city. You attack an army. But that's not the word that is used here.

The word that is used here is a... the King James translates it pushes at. And it's a word that refers to two goats or a goat pushing at something. If you've ever been around goats, you know, they butt with their heads. If you don't want to bend over in front of them, you'll get a push in your rear end there.

That's the word. So there's something... this indicates to me there's something going on there that is not a military attack as we traditionally think about it. It is something else. It is some other type of pressure that provokes the King of the North to invade in response. To invade North Africa and parts of the Holy Land. So what could that be? Could it be some of the suicide attacks, as we've seen in Europe?

This is from the Madrid train bombings about ten years ago. You might remember those in the London subway bombings and the red double-decker buses that were blown up by suicide bombers. You might think of the recent terror attacks in Nice. They were in France, or several months ago, the attacks in Paris. Other attacks like the Istanbul airport or the Egypt air flight that apparently was blown up over the Mediterranean a couple of months ago.

That might be one form of pressure, just this ongoing pushing, this pressure from suicide attack and terror attack, one after another, influencing the European psyche there. Another form of pressure might be that from all the migrants, all the Muslims who live in Europe and have European citizenship there, who don't want democracy. All they want is Islam, Sharia law, to be established there throughout Europe. Another form of pressure might be the millions of migrants, Muslim migrants, pouring into Europe.

We read primarily about those coming in from Syria and Iraq and Afghanistan, traveling through Turkey and then into Greece and up through the Balkans and coming into Europe. We also read the reports about the boat people crossing over to Italy.

Where are they coming from? They're coming from Libya. They're coming from Africa, North Africa, Egypt, Sudan, places like that. People desperate to get into Europe there. There's that kind of pressure as well. These are some of the things that aren't a military attack as such, but could well be part of this pushing act from this in-time power from the Middle East, the King of the South. What about the King of the South?

Who might that be? It doesn't have to be a king in our sense of the word because the word can also mean just a leader or a ruler or something like that. Osama bin Laden was a very popular figure in the Muslim world after the 9-11 attacks.

It's so popular that, for once, the most popular baby name for boys in the Muslim world wasn't Muhammad. It was Osama for several years there because they so respected him for attacking the West and putting the West in its place as they saw it.

It could also be some sort of popular leader who rises up like a bin Laden who stands up to the West. It could also be, we might keep in mind, that Islam believes in a figure called the Mahdi. It's kind of an Islamic Messiah. We have a Christian, Jewish Christian understanding of a Messiah, the Anointed One, God's Christ, God's Anointed, who comes and establishes the Kingdom of God on earth. They have an equivalent there called the Mahdi who will come and restore Islam or put Islam in its rightful place, dominating the world, putting the entire world under Muslim rule. There's also the concept of a caliph, a leader of the entire Muslim world. In the Islamic State about two years ago, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared himself a caliph, leader of the Islamic world. Many Islamic terror groups have pledged their allegiance to him in the recent years since he's done that. So these are three different types of people who might be a king of the North or a king of the South, rather, or it might be some combination of those. It doesn't have to be exclusive, one or the other. One individual, frankly, could fulfill all three types of leaders.

They're a popular figure, a religious leader, a prophesied Islamic messiah who comes. And there have been several Mahdis, people who have declared themselves the Islamic messiah over the years. The last one was about 20 years ago. Tried to take over the Grand Mosque in the city of Mecca. Came to an end in a gunfight with the Saudi army there in which several hundred people were killed. He came and declared himself the Mahdi, the prophesied messiah for the Islamic world. So these are several different possibilities for this end time king of the South. And any of these individuals could spring up out of nowhere at any time. Or again, could be a combination of these. So to wrap this up, then, where are we in prophecy? How close are we to the events that we've talked about today in these prophecies? Obviously, we can't say for sure. I'm not here to give you any dates. By any means, that's only the father who knows when that's going to take place. But looking at these three areas, the decline of the United States, morally and economically, looking at what is taking place in Europe in terms of unification, and ten leaders who will unite to form a new superpower, as well as how things are shaping up in the Middle East, it seems to me that the stage is being set. I'm not saying it's here now, next week, next year even. But the conditions are right for these things to begin to take place. And we're seeing things happen so suddenly on the world scene right now that things come together, could come together quite quickly, to meet these conditions that we've talked about today within a very short time. It all depends on God's timing. He's the one ultimately in control. But the stage does appear to be set for that, and the pieces that could fall into place in ways foretold by Bible prophecy. I also don't think it's any coincidence, and this is another piece of the puzzle, that the great apostasy that has taken place within the Church of God, starting about 20 or so years ago, took place when it did.

Because just as these things were really starting to form and shape up, what took place within the Church? A great apostasy, a great falling away, people scattering to the Four Winds, to every kind of belief, or no belief at all, in far too many cases. And so just as the time when so many of these things started to fall into place, what happened to the Church? The Church's voice to cry about these things, to tell the world what is taking place, was decimated by this great scattering, which, incidentally, is exactly what was foretold to happen to the Church as well. It's another... I gave a sermon on that about five years ago down here. So we do need to be watching these things, particularly these three trends. And again, these are the themes of a lot of the articles that I send you every week here. So I hope you're reading those articles. I hope you're reading our publications. To keep up on that, I hope you may want to encourage you to go back and pick up these three booklets and read those again to get more detail than that. So we do need to keep our eyes open, because these are dangerous times, sobering times. And I'd like to close with a scripture that I sent out in my update last night, 1 Thessalonians 5, verses 6 through 8. So then let us not sleep, as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober. For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk are drunk at night. But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, having put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet, the hope of salvation. In closing, I'll say we had a Q&A that was actually quite profitable in Denver this morning after the sermon. So after the closing prayer, closing hymn and prayer, those of you who would like to stay around or come back to your seats, feel free to. We'll take any questions about this. Those of you who want to go hit the restrooms or the snacks, feel free to do that. They don't feel obligated to stay around. But if you would like to stay, and if you have any questions about some of these things, we had some really good questions in Denver this morning, and had a pretty spirited Q&A about that. So if you'd like to, we'll do that just a few minutes after the closing prayer.