Commentary: In the Wake of an Unnatural Disaster (Part Nine)
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John W. Ritenbaugh (1932-2023)
Given 12-Mar-16; 13 minutes
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transcript:
This particular commentary is founded upon a sobering series of verses for anybody who firmly believes that God neither lies nor overly emphasizes any aspect of His word for sheer shock value. He says what He means and what He says.
Romans 1:18-20 (Revised English Bible) Divine retribution is to be seen at work, falling from heaven on all the impiety and wickedness of men and women who in their wickedness suppress the truth. For all that can be known of God lies plain before their eyes; indeed God Himself has disclosed it to them. Ever since the world began His invisible attributes, that is to say His everlasting power and deity, have been visible to the eye of reason, in the things He has made.
Mankind has not been shut out from the truth of God's existence. It is being deliberately suppressed. That is His testimony.
Ephesians 2:8 For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God.
Were it not for God's grace, we would be in exactly the same position.
I will give one more summary commentary covering these two related series I’ve been giving over this past year of the deceptions Satan has worked to subvert the morality of the entire Western world, and especially the confused moral issues in the United States of America.
I went into both commentary series for two related reasons. One is that unless one is careful in his analysis and therefore his understanding of knowledge gleaned from the Bible, on the surface to modern minds, much about the Bible gives the impression of being old and outdated. God is even named "the Ancient of Days," and Jesus, a Son, is pictured having blazing white hair such as is normally associated with being old. In addition, much recorded within the Book indeed did occur thousands of years ago.
The reality is those events are indeed old. In addition to that, history, as it is being lived, seems to move as slow as molasses in January. How long have we been waiting for Christ to return? Our little babies were never going to go to school. Well, they were never going to go to high school. Well, they were never going to go to college. But here they are. History seems to be moving slowly. No, it is moving at exactly the right pace. We are the ones who need to adjust.
Both of those factors together can seduce us into accepting a misconception: that God and the Bible are to some extent “out of touch.” And that, brethren, is a careless and deadly assumption to make because both the Father and Son are on top of everything, overseeing all that is going on in their creation every second all the time, throughout time. God doesn’t have to record the histories of every nation. What is important are the examples that can be gleaned from what is recorded. This is because history does repeat itself, and thus, the examples one can learn from will be repeated regardless of when they occur.
In addition, God isn’t limited by time, space, and lack of intelligence like men. They have an awesome purpose they are working out, step by step, and we are within that purpose because we are their new creation. W; we are the focus of their attentions within all that is going on everywhere on earth. Preaching the gospel is the work of the church, but we are the work of God, and that is how I know everything is going at the right pace. God never sleeps! That is a reality.
We have to adjust our thinking regarding time and how it is being used by God rather than by us. Remember that a thousand years is like a day to God. Thus, we have to look at what historians might call the Middle Ages or the Dark Ages from God’s perspective, not ours. Things were happening then that pertain to God’s purpose, and they are affecting us today, and that is what these two commentary series were about.
That is a reality; thus, the series that I gave on the philosophers. What Satan accomplished in the past 600 years has been a devastating punch in the spiritual and moral gut. We can identify where he has been focusing his labors by observing the fruits that has been produced by his work.
Revelation 12:9 asserts that Satan has deceived the whole world. I kid you not when I say it has taken him hundreds of years to accomplish what I covered in those commentaries. He is not like God. He is not omnipotent or omnipresent. He has to do everything from where he is at the time that he does it. But he has a long, long life, and it took him 600 years to accomplish what we are living in right now. It also took impeccable timing on his part, and he knew exactly where to do his most devastating deceiving.
Make note of several factors. God determined right from the beginning that those He created must be tested. When Satan attacked Adam and Eve, he did it with God’s permission and Satan did it right in their homeland. That is, right in the Garden of Eden. It’s not like they were out wandering around all creation. He deceived them right in their home.
God permitted Satan to test Job, one of the most righteous men who ever lived. He is named that. The Accuser came right into the area Job was most familiar with—his home. Do you understand that God does things in patterns in order that we might observe what is going on and thus, by faith, reach correct conclusions? Truths like this reveal whether we get the picture, so to speak. The philosophers were tools Satan worked through, even as Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar were when he accused Job.
Do you remember that everyone of the philosophers with the exception of a couple at the end of that series were Europeans. Why? There was a method in that. Why not in central Africa, Bolivia, or Micronesia? Because those areas were already enslaved by Satan’s rank paganism. In the period of history covered in the commentaries on the philosophers, Europe was where the vast majority of Israelitish peoples lived. It was those people who possessed the Word of God, and it was those people who possessed knowledge the Creator God, and to some limited degree, even worshipped Him with some measure of truth.
I showed you how that by AD 1300, universities were already flourishing in Britain, France, Italy and Germany, and that very intelligent teachers, now called philosophers, were already teaching others who were leaders of other disciplines to break from long-held moral and spiritual issues. The overwhelming majority of those moral and spiritual issues had been learned via the Catholic Church. What the Catholic Church taught was not doctrinal purity as we know it today. However, it was far, far more pure than what the philosophers were teaching in universities.
By 500 years ago, Satan already had the sources of higher education—that is, the universities—already tightly in his enslaving grip. He inspired the teaching of such highly admired educators as Descartes, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, Mill, Darwin, Nietzche, and many more to persuade those rising in governmental and educational authority to passionately insert the philosopher’s ideas into guiding social issues in their respective nations. That is how it spread—like a cancer—out from the center of educational power, the universities.
The philosophers’ ideas were at almost 180 degrees at variance to those of God’s word, and to make matters even more obviously wrong, the moral character of almost everyone of the philosophers was highly despicable to say the least. Some, like Nietzche, were literally insane. I am going to open up my next one with Marx.
But the key is this: Those leaders listened to the philosophers, and the die was cast for when the United States of America would be colonized by people who thought they were worshiping the true God and had the right religion. We shall see.
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