Biblestudy: Will the Millennium Be a Better America?

Cultural Bias and the Kingdom of God
#BS-032622
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 26-Mar-22; 64 minutes

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Good afternoon to all of you. It is good seeing you all (even though the circumstances of the weekend are not all that happy), but it is always good to see friends, and frequently, as frequently as possible.

I have noticed a trend in the church that is a little disturbing. It is not everywhere but it is in some places. It is definitely in various parts of the continental United States and in conservative areas most of all. However, being an American myself, I can understand it. It works something like this.

Most of us were born in America and as youngsters, we learned that this nation was founded on Christian principles by mostly Christian men who had a form of Christianity. Some were Deists, some were not, some were more devout than others. And the nation for many years has espoused Christian beliefs: life, liberty, justice, equality, tolerance, generosity, fairness, and things like that. Things that we can say have their origins in Scripture. Some people even speak of the US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence in the same terms that they speak of Scripture; that these were the words of the Founders and they are not quite holy writ, but close enough.

We also learned as we study our history in school, at least when I was coming through elementary, junior high school, and high school even, that God intervened a lot in the forming of this nation and in our various wars. And our Bibles tell us, if we are of the biblical scriptural kind of person that would read that, that the nation descends in great part from Joseph, the patriarch. If we go all the way back into Genesis we can trace America's history very close to the beginning, close to Abraham. And of course, we know that particularly it was his son, Manasseh, that is the father of our people. We understand too from the Bible that our rise to greatness as the great nation of this world fulfills biblical prophecy. It is right there in Genesis 48 where Jacob crossed his hands and made Manasseh a great nation, one of his firstborn sons as he would think of it.

So we think that the founding of this nation was no quirk of fate. It just did not all "come together" by chance, that God was manipulating things and maneuvering things so that it would be formed and we, like in the time of Mr. Armstrong, would say that God made it this way so He could do a great work at the end. Put the church in the greatest economic power and the peace of America so that this work could be done. We can even point to a few miraculous interventions, either recent or in the past, and these interventions, miracles if you look at it that way, seem to support all this idea that America is touched by God.

Let me give you one. This is a recent one. Maybe you have heard it, maybe you have not. We will go back to the early 1990s in the first Gulf War. One of the things that happened at the time that was so miraculous, if you want, helpful, was that rain fell shortly before the invasion. We are talking here the Middle East, we are talking Iraq, Kuwait, the sands of that desert area, but rain fell shortly before our troops started to walk from Kuwait into Iraq. Now you might say, "Well, yeah, okay, rain fell. That happens occasionally over there." But what it did is it exposed all the Iraqi land mines that they had laid to take out our equipment and our troops. So it washed it right away and we could go out there and we could see them and we go around them.

Now, if you remember back that far before the war, while the war was getting started, the news was full of Iraqi chemical weapons and we should not go in there because the Iraqi chemical weapons are terrible. It is mustard gas, it is this and that other compound, and it is going to kill our soldiers. They are going to fight that way because they fought that way against the Iranians not too long before. So there was a fear that they were going to launch them. And Saddam Hussein would have done it.

But there is another intervention that happened. Winds at that time during the year, normally blow from the north in February, coming down toward the Persian Gulf. But for the 100 hours of our invasion of Iraq, they turned to come from the south. Now, what does that have to do with chemical weapons? Winds are very important when you deploy chemical weapons because winds carry the poison wherever they blow. And so the Iraqis decided not to deploy whatever chemical weapons they had because it would have blown right back in their faces. Really interesting.

Some would say, "Wow, what a coincidence. Wasn't that great!" Others would say, if they are of that bent, that God intervened.

There are many other tales of that ilk. They go all the way back to the Revolutionary War and probably even before that, where there were interventions at just the right time. So God seems to be with this nation. That is a conclusion that we can reach that seems to be right. Add to this what I just mentioned a few minutes ago, that America is the richest nation on earth. A lot of it is in debt now. We are the richest debtor nation in the world, but we still have a lot of economic clout. It is still the engine of the global economy, although we are seeing that being eclipsed by China. It still is the lone superpower. We are levels of magnitude beyond the Chinese and others. They are trying to catch up.

But even now America is still the strongest nation in the world. People are still afraid, except when Joe Biden's at the helm, to do this or that against us.

We are still the prime exporter of Bibles. We are still the ones who send the most missionaries out to the undeveloped places of the world. And of course, we are still known around the world as being a Christian nation. Now living in it, we know that that is not true, but people perceive us that way. So it is no leap of the imagination for people to think that the United States of America is God's country or we could say at least West Virginia is almost heaven, right?

So this is this idea that I am talking about, this very disturbing little bit of attitude, if you will, that the USA is God's country. And because it is God's country, then they take it a step farther and say that because God has been so instrumental in this nation's founding and development, if He has blessed it so abundantly and made it like it is, what it is today, or what it was a few years back, then will not the Kingdom of God be a lot like America? Will not the Millennium be America only better? That it is part of God's pattern and He has given us an example of it in the United States and in the time to come, we are going to have an America-like Millennium?

This idea has begun to infiltrate the church again with all the hoopla surrounding former President Trump and "make America great again." That slogan, this idea that many people thought he was kind of a messiah figure, he was one who was going to save America and turn it around. And they started really pumping him up in the church. I saw it across Facebook, I saw it in a lot of things. I got emails about certain things that had this attitude behind it. They would not come right out and say it, but that he was divinely ordained to do something. And they were really shocked when he lost the election.

Now, we may have ideas about the election too, but God did not allow him to have another term one way or another, however we look at it. So all this groundswell of patriotism and nationalism that we have seen over the last few years has started to seep into the church a little bit and that is normal, because if it is in the world it is going to be in the church eventually. So we have to stop this idea. It is easier to do now because President Trump is on the outs and who knows if he will run again, maybe he will, maybe he will not. I do not see him staying out of the fray if he is still healthy enough to do it, because he does not listen to anybody else and he will do what he wants.

But, we have got to think seriously about this. What are our perceptions of the Millennium? Are they colored by what we have lived through? And they will be, they have to be; that is just how we work as human beings. We imagine based on our experiences. And we have to be careful that we do not imagine the Kingdom of God or even the Millennium as something like was produced in this world. It is a very important thing for us to do.

So the answer to is the Millennium going to be like America is, no way! Just get that out of the way right now. No way will it be like America. The Kingdom will not be a better America or whatever historic nation you want to put in there. It will not be a better France, and thank God for that, it will not be a better Great Britain, it will not be a better Israel. And I mean that. We have gone through enough of the history of Israel to know that God does not want the Millennium to be anything like that.

What we have to realize is that the Millennium will be—I am choosing these words words carefully—it will be entirely different and radically better than anything we have ever seen. Now, Mr. Armstrong called it the wonderful World Tomorrow. Yes, it, it will be a wonderful World Tomorrow, but it will not be based on anything we have known. And I want to show this to you. We really cannot let this world color our perceptions of it because if we understand the world, we will understand why God does not want us to think of His Kingdom in those terms.

It was not long before I prepared this (it was actually originally a Feast sermon back in 2002), I had traveled to Europe with my dad to see our brethren over there and I was already thinking about this sermon. We would go over there in August during their vacation time so the Feast was not far off. I was preparing this sermon in my head and I was struck because it was on my mind with the differences between Europe and America.

Now we say that we are all Israelites. We are all from the same big family. But they are very different from us and they are very different from each other. The Dutch are not like the French and the French are not like the Belgians and they do not like each other, and of course neither of them are like the Brits, or the Scots or the Irish or the Scandinavian countries. They are all very different. They have different ways to govern. They have different cultural things that make them stand out.

But what I saw, what I realized as I was thinking about it, that those differences do not make them either right or wrong compared to us. They are just different. And what I concluded was that they are just different levels of human foolishness. They are all wrong, whether it is French or German or Italian or, you know, we can go all the way around the world. Chinese, Japanese, South Africa, Australia. Oh, Australia has really gotten weird these days. Very controlling, hardly like an Israelite nation at all.

But I realized that when we stripped away all the rhetoric and looked at it realistically, everything was wrong. There was hardly anything right. It was almost all bad because none of these countries includes God or godly principles. If they had a godly principle, they would say it came from philosophy and not from God Himself. They do not have godly leaders and they do not have very many godly people, just those few whom God has called. They are not godly nations by any stretch of the imagination. But all these things: God's presence, God's principles, God's leaders, and God's citizens will all be present in the Millennium and in the Kingdom of God. See how radically different it is already? None, or very little, versus all.

So what I finally concluded upon coming home is that these worldly systems, wherever they happen to be, are all examples of man's ideas apart from God. They just have maybe a little sprinkling of Christianity in them or Christianity as they interpret it.

Now, I want to show you proof, if you will, that this is true. Let us go to Genesis 3, go all the way back to the beginning of this world. We will read the end of the chapter. This was after Adam and Eve's sin. God is pinning them to the wall on their sins after He makes cloaks for them.

Genesis 3:22-24 Then the Lord said, "Behold, the man has become like one of Us, to know good and evil. And now, lest he put out his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat and live forever"—therefore the Lord God sent him out of the garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken. So He drove out the man; and He placed cherubim at the east of the garden of Eden, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life.

This is the chapter that most people call the Fall of Man. I do not like that title. I do not like the title Fall of Man. It is too passive. It should be "man's rejection of God." They just did not happen to fall away from God, they spurned Him, they disobeyed Him, and decided to leave His way. And I do not know if you have noticed, I emphasized the word "drove," God drove the man out of the Garden. It was an act of judgment. He was forceful. "Get out! We don't want you to have any access to the Tree of Life because no good would come from that." So He drove them out of the Garden of Eden.

Exile from the Garden of Eden and from access to the Tree represents loss of contact with God, total loss of contact with God. He guarded, that is, God guarded this return access with a sword, wielded by an angel, one of the cherubim, so that no one could make contact with him. Verboten! You cannot come in on pain of death.

We have to understand that in this little story here is one of the greatest things that ever happened on the face of the earth. One of the biggest experiences of mankind that mankind will ever face. And that is that they were thrown out of the Garden and were completely cut off from God. It changed history forever. So God cut off all contact with all humanity, except for those He chose Himself to make contact with, to work with. And he has been very, very particular in whom He has chosen to work with. He has given His Spirit to a miniscule few. Hardly anybody. I have speculated years ago that there were 50 to 60 billion people who have lived on this earth and He has maybe given His Spirit to 0.0001% or less of those people, hardly anybody. He says out of all humanity, His first resurrection is going to include only 144,000! That is a small remnant of 50 to 60 billion.

So He has been very particular about who He wants to work with and all the rest, all that 99.999 whatever percent of the people of this world, have to rely on what the apostle Paul calls reprobate minds. Paul says, God just gave them over to the way they thought within their own stupid heads, and I put stupid in there for a reason. Most human decisions are pretty stupid, especially when you get a lot of people together in a majority and they usually do something dumb. So it has been that way ever since.

Consider, 6,000 years of people making stupid decisions. Even though the Garden of Eden and the Tree of Life disappeared under the waters of the Flood, the result of man's rejection of God is still in force. You still cannot get to God even if you want to without Him choosing you first. So all men and women have to work with now, just as then, just as Adam and Eve as they were fleeing from God's driving them out, all they have to work with is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Everything that man does is part good and part evil. You cannot do something really good, certainly not without the Holy Spirit.

So let us bring America back into this a little bit. Even though the original American system was the best that humanity has ever devised, and I believe that, even though those men seem to have been chosen by God and given wisdom to create a system like this that would work to give men freedom, especially freedom of religion, the system still falls woefully short, especially now after 240 years that it has been since 1776. We keep God at arm's length now. We are oppressive in many ways, more oppressive than we were years and years ago. Many of the decisions that are made in our courts are unjust. Think about the money that the government takes out of your pocket. A lot of people call that stealing, especially when it is excessive.

This idea of man's rejection of God and the result is found in the New Testament as well. Let us go to John 6:44. You know this one, this is a memory scripture.

John 6:44 "No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up at the last day."

He says, no one. Do we believe our Savior when He says no one? This is a definite and absolute statement by God. And it is repeated in verse 65. "Therefore I have said to you that no one can come to Me unless it has been granted to him by My Father." So He says it twice in the same chapter to make us understand that the Father is the one that draws people. The Father is the one that initiates contact with people. Everybody else cannot have access to the Father. And since the nations of this world are made up of men whom the Father has not called, no nation, however blessed and guided by God, is God's country. He uses nations. He says they are a drop in the bucket to Him. He does in them what He wills for His purposes.

And even though America and Britain are modern Israel, they are not God's people. We kind of give them a break because they are descendants of Israel. But Hosea 1:9 says very plainly, "You are not My people." He divorced them. Christ died and that covenant was broken. And what they, that is, Americans and Britons invent and believe and do, are not automatically sanctioned by God, not in the least.

If you remember the things I brought out in my sermon series on Israel, biblically Israel is often more a negative example than a positive one. Their periods of reform and doing what God wanted were very few and of short duration, but their periods of apostasy were very long. And God finally had to say, "Enough!" Because Israel, as He describes them, are stiff-necked and hard-hearted and rebellious. Israel always goes her own way, not God's way. They would rather depend on what they have learned from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil than what God Himself has taught them.

Let us go to Amos 9. This will give you an idea of God's attitude toward Israel when they are rebellious. Here is just a little bit at the end of Amos' section about how God was going to destroy Israel in just a few years. This is God speaking to Israel.

Amos 9:7 "Are you not like the people of Ethiopia to Me [Oh, that must have hurt anybody listening to that and thinking that they were God's people.], O children of Israel?" says the Lord. "Did I not bring up Israel from the land of Egypt [He would have had them nodding their heads. Yes, that is a fact of history.], the Philistines from Caphtor [They are enemies, God. Did you bring them up? Yes. He says he moved them around. He made them migrate out of Caphtor, which is Crete and made them move to Israel and they became Israel's enemies.] and the Syrians from Kir?"

Evidently, I do not know what exactly this speaks of, but He moved the Syrians around from this place, Kir, to somewhere else, probably somewhere where they would come in contact with Israel and be their enemies too. So He is explaining here,

Amos 9:8-9 "Behold, the eyes of the Lord God are on the sinful kingdom [That is what He calls them.], and I will destroy it from the face of the earth; yet I will not utterly destroy the house of Jacob," says the Lord. "For surely I will command, and sift the house of Israel among all nations, as grain is sifted in a sieve; yet not the smallest grain shall fall to the ground."

He is prophesying, here, the migration of Israel out of the Land of Promise and through the nations, and a remnant would survive and He would use them.

Amos 9:10 [notice His wording here] "All the sinners of My people shall die by the sword, who say, 'The calamity shall not overtake us nor confront us.'"

So God is not interested necessarily in their ancestry or how much He has worked with them in the past. He is not interested in the form of government or the purity of our capitalism or our global outreach (I am turning this toward us here) or anything like that. He is not interested in those sorts of things. I mean, He would like them to change obviously. But what He is really interested in is whether we obey Him. He is interested in obedience and the sin, of course, that we commit. He is interested in that from the standpoint of a judge and weighing the two: obedience, sin. Which one is it?

He will reward obedience and He will punish sin. He promises here in verse 10 that He brings justice down on the head of every sinner and the righteous will escape it, at least some of them. He specifically says that "the sinners shall die by the sword, who say, 'The calamity shall not overtake us nor confront us.'" These are the ones that adamantly believed that God would not punish for their sins. And He said, all those are gone. They did not listen to Me. I told them through the prophets that I was going to come through with a sword and destroy them for their sins. And they did not believe Me.

They thought, like Jeremiah 7 says, God has got His temple here. He will never destroy it. He has worked with us, brought us out of Egypt. He will never destroy us. God is too loving and kind for all that, is He not? But He said, those people He needed to get rid of because they just would not listen to Him. They would not even listen to Him when their lives were on the line. The Assyrians are coming. Oh, God will save us. He saved Judah from those Assyrians. But 100 or so years later, He took them out too with the Babylonians because they had the same or a worse attitude than the Israelites did.

Let us go to Jeremiah 3. I am just going to pile on here a bit because my purpose is to show that Israel was a rather wicked people, very sinful. Now notice how he frames this. Remember, Jeremiah lived a long time. He lived a fair amount of time right at the end of the nation of Judah, the kingdom of Judah, and he started his ministry in the time of Josiah. So this is where we are. Josiah was a good king. Some people think that the Bible says he was better than David. At least they were on a par. No one like David except for Josiah. Wonderful man. So this was a time of reform, the nation was swinging back toward God. See, God sets you up here.

Jeremiah 3:6-11 The Lord said to me in the days of Josiah the king" "Have you seen what backsliding Israel has done? She has gone up on every high tree, every high mountain and under every green tree, and there played the harlot. And I said, after she had done all these things, 'Return to Me.' [repent, come back] But she did not return. And her treacherous sister Judah saw it. Then I saw that for all the causes for which backsliding Israel had committed adultery, I had put her away and given her a certificate of divorce; yet her treacherous sister Judah did not fear [did not take the example, did not see the cautionary tale], but went and played the harlot also. So it came to pass, through her casual harlotry, that she defiled the land and committed adultery with stones and trees. And yet for all this her treacherous sister Judah has not turned to Me with her whole heart, but in pretense [hypocrisy, insincerity]," says the Lord. Then the Lord said to me, "Backsliding Israel has shown herself more righteous than treacherous Judah."

So Israel acted like the rest of the nations even though they had God's covenant, all of God's revelation that He had given through Moses and others. But like everybody else, they were cut off from the Tree of Life. Their access to God was only marginally better than the rest of humanity. Do you realize that in Israel, the whole cultic system, the whole ritualistic system through the Tabernacle and the Temple, is actually designed to show that they could not access God, not even Israel?

You know how the Temple and the Tabernacle are set up. There is a fence around it for one thing and it is separated from the camp of Israel by walls. That is the first thing. You can only access it through a gate. You come in and you go into the Court of Gentiles. You can go that far, I think. It is like that. As you go from the gate to the Holy of Holies, access becomes more difficult. Women, Israelite men, you can go in the first court. But then you get to the Court of Women, only Israelite men and women can go in there. Gentiles have to stay out. There is another gate and you get into the Court of Israel and only Israelite men can go in there with the priests and whatnot.

Only priests can go into the Holy Place, the first part of the sanctuary, and only the high priest can go into the Holy of Holies and only once a year for a specific reason. He could not go in there and play, you know, a game with God or whatever. He could not go in there and just wander around the Holy of Holies. He went in there for one purpose only, one time a year, to sprinkle the blood and the other part of the ritual that he had to do there and he had to get right back out. And from the things that have been passed down in history, the high priests were terrified to go in there. God even made them wear bells on the fringe of their garment so the people outside, the priests, could hear him moving in there. Just in case God struck him down and they did not hear the bells for a while, he also had a rope around his ankle where they would pull him out of the Holy of Holies should he die in there!

But that was the only time anyone in Israel could actually come before the Mercy Seat, that is, symbolically come before God, except for those few that He called like David and a few of the kings, the prophets, and some others.

What God is saying here is that they were just like all the other nations. They were just as sinful as the other nations. If you go back to Deuteronomy 7, you find that God called them not because they were the best of the nations or the biggest or had any superlatives at all. He called them because He loved them because of the patriarchs and the things that He had promised to them. And so Israel made a poor example of living God's way and then Judah came along and did even worse. They were more treacherous, more sinful than even the Israelites.

We must conclude, then, that in the modern iteration of Israel in the various nations of Western Europe, America, and let us say, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, that they are just nations of the world upon whom God has delivered the blessings of Abraham. Because He promised to Abraham that He would give those things to his descendants, not for their sakes, but for Abraham's sake and for God's sake to show that He does what He says. So modern Israel is no better and probably worse than ancient Israel.

So I have to ask you, even as good as the founding documents are, would we really want this government, this society in the Millennium? Even if it were run perfectly according to the Constitution? I mean, think about it. God has given man 1,000 years in the Millennium. How long has this nation lasted before that very good start turned into this? Like I said, about 240 years, that is all it has lasted and it is crumbling. It is not even crumbling around the edges anymore. There are deep cracks running through its heart. So even a government run according to the Constitution in the Kingdom of God would devolve into chaos just as it has with us in this time.

No, the Kingdom of God will have something far, far better. It will be, of course, ruled by Jesus Christ and its laws will come from Scripture and people will be joining the New Covenant and learning God's way and there will be 144,000 other gods that they can take advice from and that will move things in the right direction.

Let us go back a chapter to Jeremiah 2. I am piling on a little bit more but it is good to see. It is good to be reminded about how evil men are, even men that God has chosen to work with.

Jeremiah 2:1-3 Moreover the word of the Lord came to me, saying, "Go and cry in the hearing of Jerusalem, saying, 'Thus says the Lord: "I remember you, the kindness of your youth, the love of your betrothal, when you went after Me in the wilderness, in a land that was not sown. Israel was holiness to the Lord, the firstfruits of His increase. All that devour him will offend; disaster will come upon them," says the Lord.'"

What He is saying is that He was so smitten by Israel that anybody who offended Israel would take God's punishment, that disaster will come upon them. He is reminiscing here about how lovely Israel was and how it was great for that early generation to seek Him and to be with Him. And we know that it was not all peaches and cream. You know, there were problems in that early time as well, but He is looking on that time with great fondness when Israel was really special to Him.

Jeremiah 2:4-13 Hear the word of the Lord, O house of Jacob and all the families of the house of Israel. Thus says the Lord: "What injustice have your fathers found in Me, that they have gone far from Me, and have followed idols, and have become idolaters? [After that great beginning, what philosophy were they trying to follow that they would reject the Great God of the universe and bow down to these stupid idols of stone and metal and wood?] Neither did they say, 'Where is the Lord, who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, who led us through the wilderness, through a land of deserts and pits, through a land of drought in the shadow of death, through a land that no one crossed and where no one dwelt?' [Why did they not just ask God, why did not they seek Him?]

I brought you into a bountiful country [Here, He is saying all the blessings that He gave to eat its fruit and its goodness.], but when you entered, you defiled My land and made My heritage an abomination. The priests did not say, 'Where is the Lord?' And those who handle the law did not know Me; the rulers also transgressed against Me; the prophets prophesied by Baal, and walked after things that do do not profit. Therefore I will yet bring charges against you," says the Lord, "and against your children's children I will bring charges. For pass beyond the coast of Cyprus and see, send Kedar and consider diligently, and see if there has been such a thing. Has a nation changed its gods, which are not gods? But My people have changed their Glory for what does not profit. Be astonished, O heavens, at this, and be horribly afraid; be very desolate," says the Lord. "For My people have committed two evils: They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, and hewn themselves cisterns—broken cisterns that can hold no water."

What we are seeing is a pattern here. America's beginnings, like Israel's, were fairly good. It was a time of reformation, it was a time of piety among people. If you go back to the Puritans and all their influence on America, you can see that, and the people in America were very religious. And so when they crafted the Declaration and the Constitution, these influences were still there. And so they did a really good job of putting those things together to try to make good principles in a secular land.

But just like Israel, God has been forgotten. The land's resources were used for ungodly purposes. The people ascribe their greatness to idols—normally to themselves or to Baals that they have created, but mostly to their own ingenuity and strength. We are the "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" nation, are we not? And what does God say about all that, when we are going down the slope, hurtling down toward the bottom where there is going to be a great crash? He says, "Be very afraid." When this happened to Israel, when this happened to Judah, you see what happened here. The same thing is happening to America.

And by the time we get to verse 13, God zeros on the real underlying problems in the nation. The first one is that America rejected revelation from God. So it was not much more than a generation or so after those founding fathers that we left God to use our own minds to guide our policies and behavior. And the second one, which is this "hewn themselves broken cisterns that can hold no water," is that America fashioned its own set of standards, ideas, theories, aims, philosophies, however you want to put it, and they do not hold any water. We have that saying, we have that phrasing that when you are coming up with some kind of plan or project or idea, somebody will say to you, after thinking it through, "That doesn't hold any water. That's ridiculous. It won't work." And that is what God is saying to the people here, saying to us as Americans, your system will not work. It is showing signs right now that it will not work and it is going to come crashing down, and soon.

So the system will not work to produce lasting and good results. And the reason why they cannot or they will not is that they are not based on what is eternal. They are not based on the principles of God, so we are doomed to failure. We are doomed to downfall because we as Americans, as a whole, have chosen to follow the pattern of the world and not God's way. As my dad said, if Israel is not Babylon the Great, she is surely in her image. And God implores us to come out of her if we want to avoid sharing in the punishment of her sins. You will find that in Revelation 18:4.

Let us go to the end of this chapter and I think we will see one of the reasons that America is the way it is.

Jeremiah 2:33-35 "Why do you beautify your way to seek love? [He is calling them a prostitute here just so you have the background.] Therefore you have taught the wicked women your ways. [He flips it around. It is not the prostitute that taught Israel how to be, it is Israel who taught the prostitutes how to be!] Also on your skirts is found the blood of the lives of the poor innocents. I have not found it by secret search, but plainly on all these things. [He says, your sins are so easy to see I do not need to go looking in your safes or in your secret places where you hide all your sins. Nope, they are right out there plainly to see, right on your clothing.] Yet you say [this is where we get the principle], 'because I am innocent, surely His anger shall turn from me.' Behold, I will plead My case against you [God says], because you say, 'I have not sinned.'

This is incredible. Like I said, the imagery here is one of a harlot, all dolled up and appealing only to conduct sinful acts. Yet this harlot who is committing sins left and right, maintains her innocence and fully expects God not to punish her because she does not consider what she does to be sin. It is just living. It is just the way I have chosen to live. You remember, it was not too long ago, Oprah made a big thing about "this is my truth" and everybody has their own separate truth, their own individual truth. The whole nation is like that. We have all crafted our own set of standards. And usually what we have done is the things that we like to do which we know in our hearts are sinful, we have redefined our standards to make them good. So why is God going to punish us for doing what is good? We have not sinned, we are innocent.

This is what America has done. This is what the freedom that this country was founded upon has devolved into, license to create your own standards so that you can, in your own mind, consider yourself good, a good person. You do not even have to do anything good. All you have to do is redefine all those standards so that your thing, whatever your thing is, is good and justifiable. Like abortion. How many people have you seen on TV or on social media glorifying their abortions because it made their life so much freer or whatever way, angle, that they put on it to justify murdering a child. It is easy to see in that.

So America is fully convinced of her own righteousness. She thinks, I think what I do is okay so God must think it is okay too. They have totally flipped the script. They are the ones telling God what is right rather than learning from God what is actually right and good. She has got it completely backwards.

I hope I have convinced you that America cannot be a model for the World Tomorrow. America is thoroughly sinful. It has its good points but it is not godly. And this is what my dad meant when he said two, five years back that America is not a Christian nation. It considers itself a Christian nation, but its Christianity at best is only of the worldly of variety; a mix of truth and error and good and evil. But it has never had Christianity, true Christianity at its heart. It may have once reflected the best of worldly Christianity, but even that fell far, far short of the Christianity that is presented in the Bible. It is just not a Christian nation.

Better start wrapping up here. Let us go to I Corinthians 2. Paul gives us a very important principle to understand about the world to come.

I Corinthians 2:9 But as it is written: "Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him."

At its base, the thing Paul is trying to get across here, the principle that he is trying to help us to understand, is that the world to come is a mystery. It is not something that your eye has seen, it is not something that your ear has heard. He is telling us that our experiences, human history, are really no good at telling us what the Millennium and the Kingdom of God are going to be like. We have no experience with it. Now, it goes on to say here:

I Corinthians 2:10 But God has revealed [things] to us by His Spirit. . . . even the deep things of God.

But when you look at what God has revealed about the Millennium and the Kingdom of God in His Word, the information is kind of sketchy. There are things there: the desert is going to bloom like a rose, the animals are going to be nice and friendly. We are going to build the ruined places. Christ is going to be King. He will have all of us to help Him rule by what we have learned, God's way of life. But those are all very vague. There is not a whole lot of detail about the way life will be in the Kingdom. And I think there is a reason for that. One, we would not understand if He had given us detailed description of it because we have never experienced anything like that. But we have to go with what we have been given and we make a mistake, as I have been trying to say throughout this whole Bible study, when we try to compare it to what we know in this world.

Let us go back to Isaiah 11, verse 9. I just want the principle out of here too. He says,

Isaiah 11:9 "They shall not hurt nor destroy in all My holy mountain, for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea."

This is the big difference between now and then. Now remember, Adam and Eve were cut off. They had the knowledge of good and evil. But once Christ opens things up in the Millennium, the knowledge of God is going to be ubiquitous, it will be all over. Everybody will have access to it. And that is going to make the difference, along with the giving of the Holy Spirit obviously. The knowledge of God, the right way to do anything and everything, will saturate the world and it will have force behind it in terms of Christ being King and having all these other kings and priests, or royal priests or however you want to describe the firstfruits, to back it up, to be an example, to show this is what is possible if you live this way of life.

Do you realize how much that will change things? Nothing will be like it is now. It will go from nothing, hardly any knowledge of God as it is now, to everything being full of the knowledge of God. That is going to make a huge difference!

Now, it does not mean that everybody is going to do what is right all the time. People will still sin. But God's way of life will be lived by the majority of the people the majority of the time. How would you like to live in a world in which you could go out and trust everybody? I mean, we lock our doors, we keep hold our purses tight, we put our wallets in our button down pocket. We do everything because we do not trust anybody out there. So we really have a hard time imagining how it is going to work because we have never experienced it.

But just think of things that will not be around. A war department or defense department and all the money that is funneled through there for weapons, land, munitions. Think of all the money it costs just to keep a standing army going. We could think about criminal justice. I am sure God's courts are going to be far more efficient than our courts and they are not going to be like they are today where things drag on and on. And I think that will hardly be a factor if people are doing what is right.

I would like to finish with two scriptures. The first one is in Habakkuk 1, verse 5. I am taking this a little bit out of context. I just want the principle.

Habakkuk 1:5 "Look among the nations and watch—be utterly astounded! For I will work a work in your days which you would not believe, though it were told you."

Like I said, I want this sentiment. We will "be utterly astounded" at the tremendous difference between God's Kingdom and what we thought was a pretty blessed nation of this world. We are going to look back, we are going to see the Millennium at its height, and say, "America was a piker compared to this!" And it was just in one land. This is going to be worldwide. The whole earth will be encompassed by the government of God.

So even if He had described it for us in even sharper and brighter strokes, we would not believe it. We would not think such a thing was possible. And in fact, in many ways, it is still beyond our comprehension because we have no experience with anything like it. We have just had a little bit within the church of God and we still have problems in the churches with various people, various sins, various things that go wrong. So we truly have nothing to compare the Millennium with.

Let us finish in Revelation 21, verses 3-5. Again, I am taking this a little bit out of context, but I want to get the gist of it. This the New Heavens and the New Earth and New Jerusalem coming out of heaven.

Revelation 21:3-5 And I heard a loud voice from heaven saying, "Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people. God Himself will be with them and be their God. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away." And then He who sat on the throne said, "Behold, I make all things new." And He said to me, "Write, for these words are true and faithful."

Of course, this describes the time after the New Jerusalem comes down but the principle applies, at least in part, to the time of the Millennium, in the time of the Last Great Day. It will be working toward this perfection that is shown in these chapters. The government, the economics, the culture, and the society will be entirely different from anything in this present evil world. As Mr. Armstrong used to say, it will certainly not be any kind of a new and improved America. And I think that is something to look forward to with great anticipation!

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