Where Are We in Prophecy

Good morning again. Let's see if we're going to get everything to cooperate better than our recalcitrant pianist there.

Okay.

Quick and as I mentioned in my update last night, the subject of today's sermon is Where Are We Now in Prophecy? Today we live in a world that is changing at a faster pace than anything I've seen in my 60-plus years on earth.

The world is changing at a very frantic pace, and things that we just could not have imagined only just a few years ago are now becoming more and more commonplace. For example, it was only a year ago, just over a year ago, that the U.S. Supreme Court struck down all laws banning homosexual marriage and made that the law of the land. And now not only is homosexual marriage common, but we're seeing something even stranger, and that is an incredibly fierce push to cram transgenderism down the throats of the American public and to force everyone to accept that. We've seen in recent months the federal government demand that public schools, every public school in the nation, must be forced to allow students to use whichever restroom that they feel that they are that day, whether male or female. If you're a male who thinks he's a girl, he is forced to be able to go into the girl's restroom, along with other girls there. Same thing with showers and locker rooms, even. And it's so repugnant that many states, something like 15-20 states, have actually filed suit against the U.S. government to try to overturn that ruling there. The government has the force through the economic power to withhold grants and federal funding to the schools to try to enforce that sort of thing. So it is something that's just very warped, very twisted there, and everywhere we look we see the world being reshaped in ways like this that make no sense on a physical level. And as I've mentioned a number of times before, when you see things taking place that make no sense at all on a physical level, you can pretty much be guaranteed that something is taking place on a spiritual level that is beyond the physical comprehension of most human beings. So what does all this mean? What do the major headlines that we see in the news mean? What do the things that aren't reported in the news, but which are still taking place nonetheless, mean? It's been a while since I've spoken on the major trends in Bible prophecy, in time prophecy, and with the major events that have taken place over the last few weeks that have been heavily reported, I thought this would be a good time to go through the major trends that are foretold in Scripture regarding Bible prophecy, three particular areas that must be fulfilled before Jesus Christ's return. And these are things that have to happen to set the stage for the return of Jesus Christ the Messiah. And for years the Church has focused on these three particular aspects of prophecy, major trends that are talked about in Bible prophecy. They are trends that are talked about. We discuss them often in the Beyond Today magazine and in our booklets on prophecy. And they're also, even though I haven't specified it, they're the trends that show up most often in the news items that I send you in the Friday night news items nearly every week. And because the mainstream media doesn't understand anything about Bible prophecy, they're clueless and not looking for the meaning behind these things. Occasionally they will report on them, but it's strictly from a news perspective without any understanding of the spiritual trends that are taking place behind the scenes or what their long-term significance is. So today I do want to give you a brief overview of three key areas of Bible prophecy. And those three are, as we see on screen here, the spiritual and moral decline of the United States and Britain, which will inevitably be followed by their physical decline as well, which we are seeing right now, the rise of a new superpower in Europe and conditions in the Middle East, conditions that lead to a confrontation between this coming European superpower and forces within and from the Middle East.

So there are many, many prophecies that discuss these things. I'll only cover just a few of those, the key ones that are very easily understood and very evident. So we'll take a look and get an overview of where these trends are headed and to see if we can get a sense of where we might be in terms of these chronological markers that are given of things that must happen that will shape the world just before the return of Jesus Christ as King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

I'd like to begin today with the first area here, and that is the decline of the United States and Britain. Britain is taking the same path. They're just probably about 15 to 20 years ahead of us on that particular path. So I won't focus on Britain much, but just on the United States. So I'll begin in Jeremiah 30 and we'll read verses 4 through 7 here. This is the prophetic trend that is probably the most significant that is taking place on the world scene right now, and that is the decline of the United States. Prophetically, we know that America and Britain are the descendants, the physical descendants, of Jacob, whose name was changed to Israel and became the 12 tribes of Israel. This prophecy discusses the descendants of Jacob at the time of the end, as we will see within this prophecy. So Jeremiah writes, now these are the words that the Eternal spoke concerning Israel and Judah. Now when did Jeremiah record this prophecy?

He was writing during the last days of the kingdom of Judah, about a century after the northern kingdom of Israel had already been taken away into captivity at the hands of the Assyrians.

So Israel is already gone. Israel is already out of the picture about a century before Jeremiah writes these words which are a prophecy of Israel or Jacob. So Jeremiah says right here that this prophecy is what is in store for both Judah and Israel in the end time. So Jacob, or Israel, in this context, is talking about the end time descendants of Israel, mainly the modern English speaking nations of the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. So what is prophesied to happen to them that we read about here? Verse 5, for this says the Lord, we have heard a voice of trembling, of fear, and not of peace. Ask now and see whether a man is ever in labor with child. So why do I see every man with his hands on his loins like a woman in labor, and all faces turned pale? Jeremiah is giving a very graphic description here, recording the words of God, that why are men trembling as though they are giving birth? This is unusual here. This is very much out of the ordinary. They're trembling. Their hands are grasping their bellies, and their faces are pale. And then he says verse 7, Alas, for that day is great, so that none is like it, and it is the time of Jacob's trouble, but he shall be saved out of it.

So we see here what we hear prophetically in our read, in our publications, about the time of Jacob's trouble. And this verse is where we get that from. It is a time. There are three places in Scripture where it is foretold that there will be a time of trouble that is without any parallel, in all of human history. And it will be a time of trouble for the descendants of Israel, for the peoples of the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. There cannot be three separate times that are the worst in all of world history. So all of these passages are talking about the same time. This is one of those three places, Jeremiah 30 and verse 7. Another place where this is mentioned is Matthew 24 verses 21 and 22. This is the Olivet prophecy where Jesus says, this time will be so bad that unless it is cut short by the return of Jesus Christ, that humanity would face literal extinction. As he says here, for then there will be great tribulation or turmoil or trouble, such as has not been since the beginning of the world until this time, no, nor ever shall be. And unless those days were shortened, no flesh would be saved.

But for the elect's sake, for those who are part of the church, God's elect, whom He has called, those days will be shortened. They will be cut short. Otherwise, the result would be human extinction. From the words of Jesus Christ Himself. And the third place where this period of time is mentioned is Daniel 12 and verse 1. All of these referring to the end time. At that time, Michael, the archangel, shall stand up, the great prince who stands watch over the sons of your people, and there shall be a time of trouble, such as never was since there was a nation, even to that time. So all three are talking about events to take place shortly before and leading up to the return of Jesus Christ. Well, why does Jesus Christ return? Well, obviously to establish His kingdom on earth, but for another purpose as well. And that is what we saw here in Matthew 24, to save the human race from extinction. Which would be the result if He did not intervene at that time.

And of course, extinction was only possible with the development of nuclear weapons.

Near the end of World War II, 60 years ago. Then, for the first time, humanity had the capability to exterminate all human life from the planet. And since then, we've added the ability to eliminate all human life through other means as well. Through biological weapons, and also through chemical warfare. The poor man's nukes, you might say. So what does this time of Jacob's trouble involve or entail? Let's continue reading back here in Jeremiah 30 and verse 8.

He continues, For it shall come to pass in that day, says the Eternal of Host, that I will break his yoke from your neck, and will burst your bonds. Foreigners shall no more enslave them, but they shall serve the Eternal their God, and David their King, whom I will raise up for them. And here we see another time marker for when this is, at a time when David, their King, will be raised up. Now, at the time this prophecy was written, David had lived and died centuries earlier. But God says here that he will raise up David their King. He will raise David up in the first resurrection. And then David will be the King over them, and foreigners will no longer enslave the descendants of Israel. They will come out of slavery and be restored into the nation, as a nation to become God's people, as was originally intended. So again, this is not anything that was ever fulfilled historically. It was impossible. Because again, David was dead, David was dead and buried in the grave. It was never fulfilled historically in the past history of Israel and Judah. And again, this prophecy was written about a hundred years after Israel had already been taken into captivity at the hands of the Assyrians. So we see these references here to Jacob's captivity and to God's delivering them from that captivity at the time of Jesus Christ's return. And God says that this will be part of his divine correction and punishment on the descendants of Jacob. There are many, many other prophecies we could cover, but I actually eliminated about 15 minutes worth of that last night. So we won't turn to all of those. I'll just use this one because it is so specific in terms of what is to happen in a specific time frame of the time of the end. So let's ask ourselves, could something really cause these conditions to come to pass? Could bring the downfall of the United States? Well, let's consider the example of Britain. As I mentioned, Britain is probably 15-20 years further down the road from the United States. At the outbreak of World War II, 1940, 1938-39, Britain owned the largest empire the world had ever seen. It was literally an empire on which the sun never set. It encompassed the world. But in just over a decade, Britain fell from being the greatest power in the world to a second rate, maybe even a third rate power. Britain helped win World War II, played a major role in that, but the strain was simply too much. And Britain ended the war, just simply exhausted from that long fight for survival.

It just simply could not continue any longer as an empire like that. Its economic strength was spent. It had spent its way into bankruptcy in the war. Britain has recovered somewhat since that period, but it has lost its empire. And again, as it is, you know, a second rate, maybe even a third rate power in today's world. There is a term for this, and you've probably heard it a few times over the recent years, it's called imperial overreach. In other words, that's what happens when a power, a superpower, an empire stretches itself too thin and it can no longer maintain that empire.

It overcommits in too many areas that it cannot sustain. It happened to the Roman empires, where well aware from history happened to the British Empire. So I've just described it happened to the Soviet Empire within our lifetime a couple decades ago. And it is now happening to the United States, the same exact thing is happening to the United States. We simply cannot afford everything that we need to do, much less everything that we want to do. And we appear to be reaching that breaking point in more and more areas. I'll talk about two areas. Specifically, one of those is military and the other is economic, because those are two of the major gauges by which you can gauge the power of a nation. Let's talk about the United States armed forces here, the U.S. military. And although the world is growing more crazy and more dangerous every day, as we see in the headlines continually, the U.S. military is shrinking dramatically. And it's really shocking how much it is shrinking.

There's a few statistics for you. This is reflecting the current fiscal year. The United States Army is shrinking from 570,000 troops just a few decades ago, a few years ago, during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, to 450,000. This is the smallest number of troops since World War II, 60 years ago. The U.S. Navy currently has 272 ships. This is the fewest since 1916, 100 years ago. The U.S. Navy. The U.S. Air Force now has the fewest aircraft since it split from the U.S. Army after World War II. The aircraft was part of the U.S. Army. It was the Army Air Force at that time. Shortly after World War II, it split off into a separate branch of the military almost 50 years ago, but it now has the fewest aircraft since that time.

I was quite sober reading some articles yesterday at some of our major bomber bases and fighter aircraft bases. Not even half of the aircraft can fly because they don't have the spare parts for them. They have actually had to go through museums and scavenge parts out of aircraft museums to put them in planes today so they can fly. They lack enough pilots. They need several thousand more pilots than what they have. They lack the ground crews, the mechanics, the experienced aircraft repairmen, and so on there. This is how serious the readiness state of our nation is. Again, this is at a time when, if anything, we ought to be increasing our military to protect the world and to act as the world's policemen, which I've mentioned a number of different times. We're withdrawing on every front there militarily. It's something that is very frightening and very sobering. This is one of the main reasons why we're seeing so much unrest in the world. It's because there's a power vacuum there, as I wrote about in the last issue of Beyond Today. There's a huge power vacuum there. The world sees the United States retreating, and the bad guys are stepping in to fill up that void. It's just getting worse and worse, and the world is getting more and more chaotic as a result of that. On top of that, the fourth point that I mentioned here, I've shared a number of articles with you in my Friday night articles about that. The U.S. military is now being used not for defending the nation, but more and more for social experimentation.

Several years ago, they allowed homosexuals to serve openly in the military, something that had never been the case going all the way back to George Washington and the founding of the nation.

Just a week or two ago, they've now officially opened up the military to transgender individuals, allowing them to serve openly. Saying, we need, under the grounds, this is an absurd quote, we need the best qualified people. It's really going to do our military a lot of good to have mentally ill people serving in our military there. It's just crazy. Also, they're similar to what's happened in Turkey that I just talked about earlier. They're forcing out a lot of the older, more experienced generals and admirals and officers and so on who don't go along with this type of thing. They're forcing them out into retirement, putting them out to pasture. So, we're getting younger, more inexperienced officers advancing through the ranks who will support this kind of social experimentation in the army, all of which is lowering the morale of our forces and lowering the standards as well. They're also putting women into front-line combat roles there that's going to destroy the military effectiveness and lead to more and more casualties if these units actually get into fighting there. So, the decline of our U.S. military is quite striking and quite shocking. We're not hearing that much about it, but believe me, the United States, our enemies, are hearing and seeing this around the world and again stepping in to that gap, that vacuum.

What about the United States economy? If I had to sum it up in a few simple words, I would sum it up as drowning in debt. Drowning in debt. Our national debt is now more than 19 trillion dollars.

How much is a trillion dollars? I put a little graphic here for you to explain that. If you stack the 19 trillion dollar bills, one on top of another, that stack which stretched from the earth to the moon five and a half times. Imagine a stack of dollar bills that high five and a half times from earth to the moon. Got some news for you. For each one of you sitting here in this room, your share of our national debt is just under $60,000 right now.

But because some of you are too young to pay taxes, some of you are students, some of you are retired, those of you who are taxpayers, your share is $161,000.

So sundowns at $8.28 tonight, you better get to work as soon as sundown hits.

Now this is the magnitude of our debt. And this is why I say we are a nation that is drowning in debt. Most of this debt, about half of it, has been accumulated within the last eight years.

Meaning that we have accumulated as much debt in the last eight years as we did in the previous 200 years of the history of the United States. Just staggering how much debt we've accumulated.

A few other things. I don't have a graphic for these, but a little over two decades ago, the United States was the greatest lending nation on earth. We had so much money. We were lending it out to other nations as the greatest bank, you might say, for the entire world. And now, a little more than two decades later, the United States is the greatest debtor nation on the face of the earth. Not just today, but in the entire history of the world. There's never been a nation that has racked up that much debt as we have. Also, up until about a decade ago, the United States was the breadbasket of the world, shipping grains, wheat, corn, soybeans, all of this to the rest of the world. We were the breadbasket of the entire world. But as of just about a decade ago, we have become a net food importer into the United States. Meaning we import more food than we export.

And considering how agriculturally productive the United States is, that is a staggering, staggering turnaround. An enormous and fast and very dangerous change.

There's another economic figure that is called the current account deficit. Not to be confused with the national debt, although it's linked in some ways. It's roughly the US trade deficit, which means how much did we sell to the rest of the world in terms of goods and services versus how much we bought from the rest of the world in goods and services. Our current account deficit, what we imported in goods and services compared to what we exported, is about, we were in the whole about 500 billion on an annual basis, according to current statistics. To put that into a number, we can understand that means that each man, woman and child in the United States bought almost $1,500 more in goods and services from overseas than what we sold in goods and services internationally there. About $1,500 for each man, woman and child in the United States.

On the surface, it appears that the United States is perhaps the world's wealthiest nation, but the reality is it's all a mirage that we are, in fact, the world's greatest debtor nation.

All of that wealth that we see around us is because we've been running up the bills without paying for them. Running up the bills without paying for them. The US debt is being financed primarily by China in recent years. They sell us goods like TVs and stereos and electronics, computers and so on. Then they take that money and buy US government bonds, which the government will have to eventually pay off with interest. That's what the national debt is. Or part of it, a big component of it. But what will happen when the other nations stop financing our debt by essentially lending us money by buying the government bonds? Or what will happen when they switch from buying dollars to the Chinese currency or the euro or something like that? Well, then the spending spree will have to screech to a stop because no one will be willing to lend us any more money.

And that's when the economic system starts to break down. If you want an idea of what this might look like, you might think back to Hurricane Katrina. 11 years ago, and what happened in New Orleans then? The hurricane hit, the power went off, the gas stations ran dry because you can't pump gas out of the ground when the power is off. The water stopped running because the power was out, the banks weren't open, the stores closed, people couldn't get food and water, and the social order started breaking down. Within hours, people started breaking into stores, started stealing guns, looting, roaming the streets as armed gangs. A friend of mine, Scott Moss, whom you've heard speak here before, has been saying this for years, that we're only three days from the jungle.

Three days from the jungle. And what does that mean? Well, what it means by that is that most Americans have enough food in our refrigerator, in our freezer, to last us for about three days.

And when that food runs out after three days, what happens? People get hungry.

They get hungry, and then it's every person for himself. Every person for himself. And the law of the jungle prevails at that point that the fittest survived, or the biggest, meanest, most heavily armed survive. We saw that point proven in New Orleans. We've seen it proven again and again in types of natural disaster. And that's a taste of what lies ahead on a much larger scale for the nation. What could bring something like that about? You know, the United States had talked about our military decline, but the U.S. military is still the world's strongest, no question. Nobody right now is stupid enough to take us on head-to-head in a shooting war. They're just not going to do that. That would be suicide. So instead, our enemies try to attack us in other ways, or subtle ways, ways like terrorism. Few people realize this, and I've mentioned this before, but I want to emphasize it again, because the thinking has not changed, and the goal has not changed.

And I've been astonished how little has been said about this in our media. And frankly, I think our U.S. media today is treasonous, because they can do the research just as I have done, or any of us can do, and they simply refuse to do it, or they do it, and just refuse to share it with people.

But the 9-11 plot, and don't get me wrong, in no way do I think this was an inside job, as some people believe. I think that's crazy, especially in light of everything we've seen in the world since then. But 9-11 was a plot to bring down the nation in one day.

And how do we know this? Just to refresh our memory about 9-11, there were the two jets that struck the Twin Towers in New York. There was another jet that struck the Pentagon, and another jet that crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. Four jets, four teams of hijackers.

A year or so after this happened, we managed to capture an individual in Pakistan by the name of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was a right-hand aide to Osama bin Laden, and one of the key planners to the 9-11 attacks. And the CIA and Pakistani intelligence took him down into the basement and waterboarded him for a few days, and got some very useful information out of him.

Contrary to what you hear about waterboarding, this was very useful information because he was heavily involved in this plot, and was actually supposed to be one of the ringleaders here in the United States. But what he revealed is the 9-11 plot was conceived as getting somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 aircraft, hijacking 20 aircraft simultaneously, approximately 20.

And with that, they would attack not just the World Trade Centers, which they did attack and bring down, but also use one of the jets to hit the White House to take out the President, the Vice President, one to hit the U.S. Capitol when the Senate and Congress was in session, take out that branch of government entirely, one to hit the Pentagon, wipe out the top leadership of the U.S. military, hit the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, hit the Sears Tower in Chicago, hit other major landmarks in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, LA, places like that, all of the major centers of the economy and the government for the United States. It was to be a one-day attack that would decapitate the government, the military, and the industry and economic leadership of the entire nation and destroy the whole nation in one day. That was the plan that was conceived. The only reason it didn't work, and we learned this from the interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, is that Al Qaeda who was behind this was starting to feel the heat from U.S. intelligence. They were starting to put the pieces together and realize there's some kind of plot that is taking place. Their operatives were beginning to sense that their communications were no longer safe and they were being tracked and so on. So they pushed the plan up several months or a year ahead of what they were planning. As a result, because they had to rush the plan, they were only able to get enough people in the country to hijack the four aircraft instead of the 20 or so that they wanted to do. As a result, they were still able to take out the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

They were planning to take out the White House and the U.S. Capitol. Apparently, the jet that struck the Pentagon as it was flying in at low altitude wasn't able to pick out the U.S. Capitol, but they were able to recognize the Pentagon and flew the jet into the Pentagon instead of the U.S. Capitol.

And then there was the other jet that went down in Pennsylvania, but it was making a beeline for Washington, D.C. when it went down as well. So could that plan have worked? Well, obviously, it was staggeringly successful as it was. And what they did managed to pull off, stun the entire world.

Could they do something like that again? Well, they're certainly trying to, certainly threatening to. I've read a number of books and authors from over the years since then saying that Al-Qaeda, ISIS, others like that have been trying to acquire nuclear weapons and smuggle them into the United States across the Mexican border or across the Canadian border. We hear a lot about the Mexican border, but actually the Canadian border is much more wide open. You can actually go up and drive logging roads or roads out into prairie provinces and cross the border virtually undetected there.

Or wait till dark when the guards go home or whatever. So the Canadian border is actually more porous than the Mexican border that we hear so much about. So imagine what would happen if some terrorist were able to smuggle a nuclear device into the United States and set it off in a Chicago or a Los Angeles or Washington DC or in New York or so. The economic consequences for the nation would be just stunning, devastating. In the stock market crash after 9-11, a trillion dollars of wealth just disappeared from the collapse of the stock market or the fall of the stock market after that. So if we had something like a nuclear attack on a U.S. city, we might overnight be looking at another Great Depression like that of the 1920s and 30s.

And also it used to be just Al Qaeda that we had to worry about. Now the number of terror groups has proliferated so much in recent years. Now there's also the Islamic State, there's Hezbollah, there's Islamic Jihad, there's Boko Haram, and various other terrorist entities that we have to worry about as well. But that is also not just the only way that the United States could be brought down. Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28, those are two chapters that are the Blessings and Cursings chapter that describe to ancient Israel the blessings that would come on a nation that, if they obeyed God and served Him, and conversely the curses that would come for disobedience.

And America is starting to reap a number of these curses. I'll just read a few verses here out of Leviticus 26 that are particularly pertinent to some of the headlines that we see today.

Reading in verse 14, 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.

How often do we hear that word in the headlines these days?

You know, terrorism was a concept that would have meant nothing to the Israelites back then.

But it means an enormous amount to us today, because of what we see in the headlines every day.

I will appoint terror over you, wasting disease and fever, which shall consume the eyes and cause sorrow of heart.

Wasting disease, could that be referring to something like biological warfare?

Or just think, I'm continually sending you out articles about how this or that disease have become drug resistant.

STDs are one of the greatest areas of drug resistance right now, where they can't be treated by the conventional antibiotics.

Here, our hospitals are plagued with strange new infections that are impervious. They are impervious to our most powerful antibiotics.

If that weren't bad enough, long diseases that have been vanquished for decades in the United States are making a comeback. Things like tuberculosis and measles, which haven't been seen in the United States for a couple of decades, are now showing up all over the country because we're importing immigrants from Syria, from Africa, from Afghanistan, from Iraq that are carrying these diseases that are native and widespread in those populations here.

Our own government is bringing in diseased individuals and spreading these diseases to the population again.

Again, other diseases are losing their resistance.

There are some of the strains of tuberculosis are very resistant to the drugs that are commonly used to treat that.

Continuing on, last part of verse 16, And you shall sow your seed in vain, for your enemies shall eat it.

Again, we are becoming now a net importer of food. We're shipping food out of the country and importing it from others there, which aren't necessarily our friends.

And let's see... Yeah, skipping over to verse to Deuteronomy 28, I wanted to pick up one verse out of this chapter. Let's see, I actually left a verse out of my notes.

Actually, let me go back here to Leviticus 26. This isn't in my note, but I left out verse 17.

Where God says, I will set my face against you, and you shall be defeated by your enemies. Those who hate you shall reign over you, and you shall flee when no one pursues you.

Why has the United States lost so much of its respect and standing in the world? Why do our enemies no longer fear us but actually openly mock us at times?

We see terrorist states like North Korea openly threatening to attack us and our allies with weapons of mass destruction. We see Iran threatening to wipe Israel off the face of the earth.

President Obama visited Cuba a couple of months ago, and right after he left Fidel Castro, an old has-been, if there ever was one, actually mocked and ridiculed our president there just a few days after his visit. And of course, about a year ago last summer, our government signed a treaty that essentially guarantees that Iran will have nuclear weapons in 10 years. So we have a collective insanity in our national leadership right now. So none of this really makes sense until we realize that again, powerful spiritual forces are at work, including spiritual laws that when we break those laws, those laws break the people who break those laws. And we are reaping what we have sown. And while our leaders deny the reality that is taking place, it doesn't do away with the consequences of that reality and the choices, the path that we have chosen. America heading down a dark and dangerous path and rival prophecy reveals where it will lead.

And what will eventually happen? Now skipping to the verse that I showed a minute ago, Deuteronomy 28 and verse 25. This is another very striking aspect of this prophecy. Again, this is from the Blessings and Cursings chapter, the other one. But God says here, you shall become troublesome to all the kingdoms of the earth. And to me, this is one of the most staggering developments on the world scene in the last decade, and actually only within the last three or four years, how the entire world is lining up against the descendants of Israel. Now think about that.

What we're seeing is all kinds of bizarre alliances taking place around the world. Things like Russia and China that for years have been odds are coming together and allying and cooperating on economic projects and that sort of thing. One of the more bizarre ones, we have North Korea, which is a strictly atheist state, communist state, becoming friends with Muslim countries like Iran, and Pakistan, and Russia. And we see Russia selling a nuclear plant to Iran, and advanced missile systems and submarines to Iran, which is a heavily Muslim theocracy. And we see everybody lined up and selling arms and missiles and tanks and ships and submarines to anybody and everybody else who has the money to pay for it. And of course, we see, in a powerful development, all the Muslim world uniting and aligning itself against the Israelite nations. And all of these have one thing in common. That is that they're coming together not against the bad guys of the world, but against the good guys. Coming together not against the real threats to world peace and stability, but against the modern descendants of Israel, the modern Israelite people. Now why does God say that this punishment will come on the United States and the other descendants of Israel, or Jacob? Well, because God set up ancient Israel and Israel today to be a model nation, so that other nations could see a nation live by God's laws and see how that nation was blessed, and to be an example to those nations of the blessings and benefits that come from obeying God's laws. But today we are an example, all right, but an example of what? Isaiah 3 and verse 9, God says of us that they declare their sin as Sodom, and they do not hide it. In other words, we've gotten to the point in the nation today where we have no more sense of shame. You know, things that a generation ago used to be just so bizarre, so beyond the pale of decency and morality are now very common place.

Let's consider just a few things about how the moral climate of the United States has changed just in recent years. Three presidential administrations ago we had a U.S. president being sexually gratified by an intern in the Oval Office. Highest office in the land, committing adultery, fornication with an intern.

We've had many congressmen, governors, who've had to resign or lost their office due to the revelation of sexual affairs with women and with men. We now have Opens Homosexuals serving in government on many levels. I think right now we have six ambassadors to other countries who are homosexuals representing our country at the highest levels. These are the people being chosen to represent U.S. values to the rest of the world. Somebody sent me an article earlier this week, this is a short sidebar, hopefully short sidebar, Christopher Stevens, the ambassador to Libya, who was brutally murdered in the Benghazi attacks several years ago. Someone sent me an article, an elder in another country, and asked me what I knew about it. This article mentioned that Ambassador Stevens had been, this wasn't released by the U.S. media or was known and was not released, I'm not sure which, but his body had been brutalized, his genitals cut off, he had been sodomized with foreign objects, iron bars. Why? Because he was a homosexual.

Our government appointed a homosexual to a country that is 100% Muslim, where homosexuals are routinely stoned to death. And the appalling thing is our government thought that was a good idea to share American values in that way. They also tried to appoint a homosexual as an ambassador to the Vatican several years ago, and the Vatican said, no way, we reject this entirely. This is the kind of values that our nation, our government, is promoting to the rest of the world.

Another area, look at our entertainment. TV is dominated by disgusting reality shows, programming with a clear pro-gay agenda that trashes families and traditional morality, that portrays fathers as idiots and incompetence, movies that are drenched in gore and violence, music, especially rap music that is utterly obscene and degrading. We idolize celebrities who have babies out of wedlock, multiple affairs, who live together outside of marriage. We could go on and on. This is what we are filling our minds with in terms of entertainment as a nation.

And all of this has an impact on our national morality. The illegitimacy rate in the United States, the percent of American births that are out of wedlock, in the early 1950s, our illegitimacy rate was 4%. One out of 25 births in 1950s were to single mothers. By 1988, it had gone from 4% to 25% from 1 out of 25 to 1 out of 4. As of 2014, which is the latest statistics I could find, it was now 40% of US births are illegitimate. 2 out of 5, 2 out of every 5 births are illegitimate. And then we wonder why we have so many problems with crime and poverty, because the two greatest predictors of children growing up to be criminals or to live a life in poverty are to be illegitimate, to not have a father in the home or a two-parent family there.

So we're just exacerbating that problem. That's why it keeps growing and growing and growing.

In recent years, court decisions have legalized sodomy and legalized homosexual marriage as the law of the land. At the same time, court decisions have banned display of the Ten Commandments, banned the Bible, banned prayer. They're even now trying to ban the words under God from the Pledge of Allegiance. We're witnessing also in conjunction with this growing systematic hostility toward Christians and Christian values and religious expression in the United States. We have a nation that's basically pretty much split down the middle between those who do believe in God and go to church regularly and those who are growing increasingly hostile to sincere religious beliefs. And those who don't go along with that, if you're a business owner, as we've seen in a number of court cases that I've forwarded articles to you about, we've seen people who refuse to cater to gay weddings by providing photography services or cakes or even wedding venues, we've seen their businesses shut down. We've seen, in some cases, people actually ordered to undergo government-mandated reprogramming to correct their thinking to accept these perversions as normal.

We're seeing growing evidence of ignorance of the Bible. Some examples of this. A Gallup poll found that only half of American adults could name any of the four Gospels. Think about that. Half of U.S. adults could not name any of the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Only one person in four could name even half of the Ten Commandments, which hopefully we have memorized. Another survey found that half of professing Christians thought that living together and having sexual thoughts about non-spouses was morally acceptable, directly against Christ's words in the Sermon on the Mount.

A third of Christians thought that adultery, pornography, drunkenness and having abortions were morally acceptable. A third of Christians, professing Christians, were witnessing an astounding moral breakdown on just about any measure you want to use, whether it's divorce rates, adultery rates, rates of living together, teen sex, drug use, content of popular entertainment, anything you want to number there. We've had almost 60 million abortions since abortion was legalized.

And now we've seen from some of the films, I've sent you links to, abortions are actually performed and they're selling off baby body parts for huge hundreds of dollars for different body parts. We're murdering the unborn for profit. I can go on and on, but this is just a short list of the enormous changes in the United States and in the world, in the last generation. We are an example of a nation that has been greatly blessed by God, but then turning around and essentially spitting in His face and denying His existence.

Reminds me very much of another prophecy, Isaiah 5 and verse 20, where God says, "...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 that's what we're seeing more and more every single day from people, people including our government leaders, who call evil good, like some of the examples I mentioned to you a few minutes ago, and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness. And because of that, God says He's going to make an example of us. You should have been the example of what it means to obey my laws and be a blessed nation, but instead you're going to be an example of what happens to a nation that abandons me.

And turns your back on my God, on my laws, and that day of reckoning is coming.

And it could come quite soon and quite suddenly from some of the examples that I mentioned to you earlier. Let's now move on to a second major area of prophecy. I'm not going to spend nearly as much time on the last two as this first one, but I want to talk about Europe briefly here. What about developments in Europe? Europe, for years we have understood that a new superpower would emerge from Europe, and that superpower would be an in-time resurrection of the Roman Empire. And again, I won't go through all of the history, but in Revelation 17 we see in vision, that was given to John the Apostle, a new superpower, a beast with ten horns that are identified as ten rulers who will unite in the in-time for a short time and then are destroyed by Jesus Christ at his return.

I might mention also too all three of these areas are covered in a lot more detail in our booklets here. I grabbed these off our back table there, so you can grab your own copies. We have them on the United States, which I've just covered, and Europe is basically covered in the book of Revelation Unveiled. And then the third one is the Middle East. So we do have booklets in all of these subjects and are working on more. But let's go through here what is prophesied to happen about Europe here. I'll cover this quite briefly here. But Revelation 17, the pertinent prophecy here, says, Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and talked with me, saying to me, 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. 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. The woman was a raid and scarlet and purple, 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 we understand that this woman is representing a great false church. The devil again rise to prominence. It has held a great deal of prominence in European history over the centuries, but will hold greater prominence again at the time of the end. Continuing in verse 12, skipping down a bit, then John we see in his prophecy an explanation of the symbolism of this mysterious beast that he saw. He says the ten horns, or an angel is actually giving this explanation 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 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 here the time setting of this. This exists at the time of Jesus Christ's return.

They will make war with the lamb, and the lamb will overcome them, for he is Lord of lords and King of kings. And those who are with him, the saints who return with Jesus Christ, are called, chosen, and faithful. So here is an illustration of this beast. The beast with the seven heads, the seven heads are the creatures that are mentioned in earlier prophecies back in the book of Daniel, and the woman riding the beast dressed in scarlet and purple. And we see the different horns on the beast. It's a little bit hard to make out here, but the ten horns there that are representative of ten kings, as we just read, that come together and unite in a final, end time superpower there. And they give their power to the beast before they are all destroyed, the woman and the beast, at the return of Jesus Christ. We'll go into more detail in that. This is just a brief overview of where we understand the concept of ten kings, ten rulers coming together at the end time, and uniting in this end time superpower. We see this also prophesied in a parallel prophecy back in Daniel chapter 2. This is the famous prophecy of the image that King Nebuchadnezzar dreamed about. And Daniel came to interpret it. Here is Daniel interpreting the dream to Nebuchadnezzar. He says, This is the dream. Now we will tell the interpretation of it before the king. He's talking to Nebuchadnezzar. You, O king, are a king of kings. You are this head of gold of this image. But after you shall arise another kingdom inferior to yours, then another, a third kingdom of bronze, which shall rule all over the earth. The earth here is talking about the known world, basically, which encompasses the Middle East and over to Greece, later Italy, and so on. It's not talking literally the entire earth. There. Verse 40, And the fourth 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.

And verse 41, 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 the kingdom shall 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 finally, And in the days of these kings, this is getting down to the feet and the ten toes, made of iron and clay mixed together, and in the days of these ten 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.

So here we see the ten toes, and these correspond with the ten horns that we read about earlier from Revelation 17. Here's a graphic representation of the image that Nebuchadnezzar saw and explained to Nebuchadnezzar. So we see the head of gold representing the Babylonian empire of Nebuchadnezzar. Then we see the chest and arms of silver corresponding to the Medo-Persian empire. Then the belly and thighs of bronze or brass corresponding to the Greek empire of Alexander the Great.

And then the legs of iron and the feet of iron mixed with clay representing the Roman empire and its resurrections through history and its existence as an end-time superpower. And of course then continuing with Daniel's prophecy, a stone comes from heaven and strikes this image and destroys it. And the stone then expands to fill the entire earth.

And that of course is representative of Jesus Christ's return and the kingdom of God filling the entire earth. So the ten horns of the image in Revelation 17 represent these ten end-time leaders or rulers who unite together and give their power to the beast and they correspond to the ten toes of this image, the Nebuchadnezzar's vision there, which are also destroyed at Christ's coming. And although the imagery is very very different, ten horns versus ten toes, they are describing the same thing and the succession of empires and the final superpower that will actually fight against Jesus Christ and be destroyed in that final conflict.

Now we have long believed and taught and understood that this superpower would be centered in the heart of the old Roman Empire in Europe and that it would involve rulers from the old Roman territories coming together to form a new superpower. We see this in the images we just looked at too. The legs of iron clearly represented the Roman Empire. It's two branches, the Eastern and Western Roman empires, coming down to the ten toes. And the same thing with a beast that is a composite of the different beasts, one of which represented the Roman Empire that Daniel saw, which we're skipping over for purposes of time right now.

So we have long understood that. And we have seen this process of trying to unify Europe and rebuild a Roman Empire working steadily back since the 1950s. It's been going on for several generations now. What is the status of this unification effort? Well, the recent big news out of Europe was the British vote to leave the European Union, something that we have thought and taught would long happen because the British, being descendants of Jacob or Israel, would not be a part of this final European Empire there.

And what has happened now in the wake of that British vote to leave the European Union, now we're seeing a number of other countries, possibly France, possibly Italy, in the articles I sent you last night, who are making noises about leaving the European Union as well. The whole European Union, as it has existed for the last few years, looks like it will unravel.

I think that is probably what will happen. The pressures are just so great on it. And what we've had is Britain being one of the more productive, economically productive parts of the European Union is leaving, so that makes the pressure on Germany and France and the other productive nations of the European Union that much greater because they will be called upon to support the other deadbeat countries of the European Union, like Italy, like Portugal, like Spain, like Greece, who have enormous debt problems similar to those to the United States that I covered earlier.

Frankly, what has happened is the European Union has expanded out to 28 nations, and it has just become so big and so unwieldy that it's almost impossible to get anything done. It's actually weakened itself because it has become so unwieldy. And I think that whole system is starting to unravel. And frankly, for prophecy to be fulfilled, as we understand it, it needs to be slimmed down into something that is much more lean, much more efficient, much more mean to be blunt, much more oriented to Europe's ancient Roman roots in the Roman Empire. You may remember the video I showed you several months ago from a museum I visited in Rome, from the museum, about the dream of going back to Europe's roots. And that kind of thinking is quite common in parts of Europe. So slimming down and shedding some of these other nations that are obstacles to European unity would allow the EU, or a successor organization, to unify much more quickly and much more strongly. Let's consider a few facts about where the European Union is right now. Considering this is sort of a baseline for what may come in the future. They've already had a common currency for years in the form of the euro.

In terms of government, the European Union has had many, already has an operation many of the attributes of our US government. For instance, they have a presidency that rotates among its members. They have a Senate which calls itself the Council of Ministers. They have a House of Representatives, the equivalent which is called the European Parliament. They have their own version of a Supreme Court. So all of the major branches of government that we've had in the United States for the last 200 years, they have developed in the last few decades here. They are trying to establish a common European foreign policy. In the last year, the last months in particular, they've been talking about creating a common military force to further European aims and power.

Now in times of crisis, one of two things generally happens. Either people pull together or they split apart. Is Europe in crisis right now? Absolutely it is. It's struggling for its identity. That's part of the issue with Britain leaving. They decided they didn't want to be a part of this new European identity. It's struggling economically with the nations, like I mentioned, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, being financial basket cases that are dragging down European growth and the overall economy there. It's struggling with the huge influx of Muslim immigrants. It's struggling with what to do about Russia, which is gobbled up part of Ukraine and is now threatening parts of Eastern Europe. They realize, well, all of this is leading to the realization and the growth among a number of right-wing movements, neo-Nazi movements, you might say, that unless things change and change dramatically, there won't be a Europe as they recognize it in a few years. So they realize they have to act fast and change things. These right-wing political parties are gaining more and more power throughout the nations of Europe. And frankly, this sounds to me like exactly the kind of scenario in which a smaller core of ten nations could unite quite quickly behind a single strong leader for a short time. This happens in a short time, as we saw back there in Revelation here. They give their power to this one leader for a short time. A short time indicates that it's some type of crisis that draws or pushes or pulls these people together there. And are there negatives about along the road to Europe becoming a superpower? Well, obviously there are. Europe has very high unemployment, about 10 percent. It has high social spending. It has slow economic growth and an aging population. And it has this huge immigration problem that we read about that may soon explode in their faces there.

But these aren't factors that argue against a new European Union. They're actually the type of problems that lead to stressful conditions that again either draw people together to solve the problem or split people apart. If you think back to Germany before World War II, Germany was a basket case in every way. It was economically crippled, enormous unemployment, very high unemployment, incredibly high inflation rates. People were literally taking wheelbarrows full of money to buy a loaf of bread before somebody stepped in and said, I will solve all of your problems. And that person's name was Adolf Hitler. And he united Germany and Austria and other nations and brought them together and formed an earlier version of a European Union. So in summary, when it comes to European unification, it is a process that is still moving forward, not backward. And at the moment what it's moving toward is a smaller core of nations, as indicated in Bible prophecy there. And also a large motivation for European unity, too, we have to keep in mind, has been to compete frankly with the United States.

To compete economically, which is why they created the euro, and to compete politically against the United States because they get tired of the United States and Russia being the world superpowers and then the United States alone. So they're moving toward a competitor to the United States in terms of a world superpower. So again, if an emergency situation were to arise or a major crisis that threatens Europe, I don't think there's any doubt that they could come together and create a core, as we see prophesied there in the Bible. So I do think we are seeing the stage set for this to be fulfilled quite quickly at whatever time God decides is right for that to happen. Now let's take a quick look here at the third major area of prophecy, which is the Middle East. And as the church has said for years, the Middle East continues to dominate the headlines of the world.

We're now seeing several major wars. The most obvious is the war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, and to a lesser extent, the war in Afghanistan. But there's also another less obvious war taking place, and that is an ideological war for the future of Islam. And we see that being played out in Iraq and Syria. You may have wondered why for decades now we've seen Muslims killing Muslims, such as between the Iran and Iraq war a couple of decades ago, and killing each other in Iraq, in Syria, and in Afghanistan, and Libya, and Egypt, and Yemen, and places like that. And this is part of an ideological war for the future of Islam, between those who believe that they should live and let live and accept Islam as it's been practiced for the last few centuries there, and those who want to take Islam back to its glory days of conquest, and plunder, and rape, and all of that. If you want to understand what these people want, you can look back to the 1979 Iranian Revolution when Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in Iran and what happened there, and how they started the modern terrorist movement throughout the world. You might look at what ISIS is doing right now. If you want to see the kind of world that they want, a world under Sharia law, all you've got to do is look at ISIS and what they're doing with the beheadings, and the torture, and the sex slaves, and all of that. The articles I've been sending you about that.

These people want not just the Middle East, but the entire world to look like that.

And if you listen to what they're openly saying, they clearly see themselves as at war against Western civilization. And their goal is nothing less than to overthrow Western civilization. And for that to happen, they have to overthrow the Great Satan, which is the United States, the Great Satan. Satan means adversary. America is their adversary. It's a thing that is standing in their way for Islam to rule and dominate the world. So that is precisely what was behind the 9-11 attacks. It's what's behind all the ongoing terror attacks as well.

So what have been the recent trends in the Middle East? Well, for decades we've been seeing a massive transfer of wealth from the United States and Europe and Japan and other countries, too.

They're all producing nations of the Middle East. Countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia, like Libya, hotbeds and supporters of terrorism. There. And a lot of that money has gone to help develop weapons of mass destruction, chemical weapons, biological weapons, and in the case of Iran, nuclear weapons. Many countries have these types of programs. Pakistan has somewhere, or latest estimates, around 100 nuclear weapons. Their program, incidentally, was funded by Saudi Arabia with their oil money. So essentially we have a case where Saudi Arabia owns about 100 nuclear weapons on the shelf in Pakistan that whenever Saudi Arabia wants, they can bring up Pakistan and say, hey, remember those 100 nukes we've bought for you?

Hey, send a couple of dozen over here. We've got a use for them.

You may not realize this, but one of the shakiest regimes in the world right now is Pakistan.

The leaders there have been walking a very fine line between trying to appease the United States and the war on Afghanistan and trying to appease their own citizens. Within many, many of Pakistan's officers and their secret service, their equivalent of the CIA, are actually supporters of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. That's why bin Laden was able to hide out there for a number of years in Pakistan after fleeing Afghanistan. So they're walking a very fine line and that government could be overthrown. And if it does, or when it does, there's about 100 nuclear weapons that will fall in the hands of who knows who? Al Qaeda, various terrorist groups, that sort of thing.

So that could be a very terrifying and destabilizing event for the entire world if suddenly 100 nuclear warheads are spread out to various terrorist groups around the country.

If you've been following the news, you're also aware of Iran's attempts to develop nuclear technology, which nobody believes has any peaceful intent. So, potentially, in anywhere from a few months to a few years or 10 years at the expiration of the Iranian nuclear treaty, we can see a number of terrorist groups or Middle Eastern Muslim regimes armed with nuclear weapons here. So, this is certainly a very, very dangerous set of trends going on.

Where are these trends heading? Let's turn over to Daniel 11 and verse 40. I'll just read this one verse here, which talks about this part of a very long prophecy that actually spans centuries.

But I want to talk about one particular thing that triggers a bloodbath just before the return of Jesus Christ. It says here, at the time of the end, the king of the South shall attack him. The him is the king of the North, the leader of the European superpower we just talked about a minute ago. 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.

Specifically, the countries he invades are Northern Africa, Egypt, Libya, down into Sudan, Ethiopia, and over to the Holy Land, where he sets up a headquarters there at the end time. We won't go through all of those scriptures. But the point I want to draw our attention to is this word attack here. The Hebrew word actually means pushing to push at. There are Hebrew words for attack in a military sense. People attack a city, they attack an army. But that Hebrew word is not the one that's used here. The one that is used means push at. It's used of goats pushing, or ramming, or butting heads with each other. It's not used in an attack in a military sense.

So there's something going on here that isn't a strictly military attack that is taking place from the king of the south against the king of the north.

I think that's helpful to help us understand what might be taking place here.

Could this pushing at be this continual pressure that we see so much in the headlines of terror attacks? Like the ones in Madrid of the train bombings, or the attacks against the London subway and double-decker buses years ago, or those in Paris over the last two years, or the attack in Nice that we saw just this week, or the attack on the Istanbul airport directed toward Westerners there, or the Egypt air flight that disintegrated over the Mediterranean and was brought down several months ago? Could this be the push, this continual pressure of terrorism? Things like that. Could it be another oil embargo? Some of you are old enough to remember the oil embargoes from the 1970s here in the United States, and lines at the gas stations that stretch for blocks long of people trying to get gas for their cars. Europe is very heavily dependent on oil from the Middle East, much more so than we are. Could it be something like that? Could it be the growing conflict between Europe's Muslim population, who are determined not to integrate? They don't want democracy, they just want to practice their Islamic way of life.

They want Sharia law throughout Europe there. Could it be the the millions of immigrants flooding into Europe, from Syria, from Afghanistan, from Iraq, from Libya, from other North African countries there? Are these the type of push or ramming from the areas of the king of the south against the king of the north? Frankly, I think so. I think these factors are possibly a combination of these.

We might also keep in mind who this end time king of the south might be.

And again, king is a biblical term. It means a leader, a ruler. It doesn't mean a literal king from a royal family. It can, but it's more often used in a generic sense of a leader or a ruler.

And several possibilities there. I've talked about some of this before, but Osama bin Laden, for instance, gained a huge following among Muslims around the world to the point that it got to the point where the most common name among Muslim baby boys for a while wasn't Muhammad. It was Osama, after Osama bin Laden, after the 9-11 attack. So somebody who just has, who stands up against the west and leads this kind of jihad against the west, could be viewed as a leader, who could be a candidate for the king of the south. It's also important to understand that many Muslims expect a Mahdi, an Islamic messiah, you might say, who will arise in the end time and lead the Muslim world to its rightful place of ruling over the entirety of the world. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of the Islamic State declared himself a caliph just over two years ago. They also expect a caliph, a leader of the Muslim world. That's not to say that all these three are exclusive of one another. This leader could be a combination of one, two, or all three of these. He could be a popular figure, could be a religious figure like the caliph, could be a prophesied figure like this Mahdi who arises. And there have been several Mahdi's who declared themselves the Mahdi throughout Muslim history there. So we have several different candidates who could rise up at any time to be the leader of the end time king of the south, that is talked about here as well. So who would lead the Islamic world against this end time king of the north there in Europe? So where are we in prophecy? How close are we to the events that we read about in the Trump policies? We can't see for sure. But looking at these three key areas, the condition, the declining condition of the United States morally and economically, of what is taking place in Europe, and how things are shaping up in the Middle East, it seems to me that the stage is being set continually for these events to be fulfilled. We are seeing, I think, that these events could, as quickly as our world is changing around us, if these events could come together quite quickly within a very short time. It all simply depends on God's timing, His timetable. But it does appear that the stage is being set for these things, these pieces of the prophetic puzzle, to fall into place. I also don't think it's any coincidence that the great apostasy that has taken place in the Church of God about 20 or so years ago took place when it did, because that basically corresponded to the beginning of a lot of these trends here.

At the very time when the Church should have been more powerful and more unified in getting this message out to the world, what happened? The power of the Church, the power of the Holy People was shattered and destroyed, and God's peoples spread to the Four Winds there. I don't think it's any coincidence. I think Satan knows what is coming, and I think he deliberately undermined and did everything he could to decimate the voice of the Church of God with so many people abandoning the truth and scattering, which incidentally is exactly what was foretold to happen to the Church at the end time as well. So we do need to be watching these things. We need to be keeping an eye on these three crucial areas of prophecy in particular. And I hope you're reading on our publications that you're reading the articles that I send you every week on that to keep up on these developments. You'll find a lot more information there than what I've been able to cover in this overview in this sermon. So in conclusion to quote a passage I sent out to you last night, 1 Thessalonians 5, verses 6-8, 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. So we'll have another closing hymn. And then if you'd like to go out and get some snacks, we will then just be seated if you have any questions. I tell you what, let's just handle it this way. Any of you have any questions you'd like to ask? Because, okay, a couple. So yeah, any of you who'd like to be excused and go on out there, those of you who do have questions or would like to listen in, yeah, let's just pull up and we can answer that after the closing hymn and closing prayer.