The great irony, the great tragedy, among many present in our time, is that more and more people are of the belief that removing God, removing existing foundations in Christian faith, attempting to nullify and make extinct God, the Lord Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, the Bible, Christianity, and Judaism will increase freedoms and liberties. Free up the people! Break the chains of bondage!

The exact opposite is the reality. The more people deny God, blaspheme God, attempt to remove, discredit, alter the Holy Bible, and diminish God in the vain attempt of making God disappear the greater the chains of bondage weigh down the people who profess such rubbish. And it is rubbish. Yet so much more. It is the doctrine of slavery. The removal of God, of the Holy Bible, of the Christian faith in reality removes freedoms and liberties. Removes the greatest of all liberties.

And is making the way for the greatest tyranny and fascism the world has ever witnessed not only possible but inevitable.

Delusion is the order of the day.

Lies are what pass for truth.

The people, for the greater part, have no real interest in truth. Not really. Though they always say they do. If this were so the condition of individual men, women, and children would be amazingly different than our present reality.

No, as God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, and the contents of the Holy Bible are pushed aside and scoffed at, ridiculed, laughed at, and denied what those doing such things are in fact doing is selling themselves into the greatest lie, the greatest tyranny and fascism the world has ever seen and ever will see.

But attempting to warn folks of this, out of concern for their individual well-being and eternities, as well as their present is met with derision, contempt, anger and closed ears, shut eyes, and cold dead hearts and minds. Prefering the lies of the father of lies, the devil.

Speak or write of tragedy! Of sorrow! Of irony!

Will folks listen? Will they see?

Well, we must push on and continue, never cease to exhort, to instruct, to help, in a genuine caring, loving, humble way to spread the gospel — which is Jesus Christ.

And…

The Parable of the Sower

Again he began to teach beside the sea. And a very large crowd gathered about him, so that he got into a boat and sat in it on the sea, and the whole crowd was beside the sea on the land. And he was teaching them many things in parables, and in his teaching he said to them: “Listen! Behold, a sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seed fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured it. Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and immediately it sprang up, since it had no depth of soil. And when the sun rose, it was scorched, and since it had no root, it withered away. Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain. And other seeds fell into good soil and produced grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold.” And he said, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

The Purpose of the Parables

And when he was alone, those around him with the twelve asked him about the parables. And he said to them, “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables, so that

“‘they may indeed see but not perceive,
and may indeed hear but not understand,
lest they should turn and be forgiven.’”

And he said to them, “Do you not understand this parable? How then will you understand all the parables? The sower sows the word. And these are the ones along the path, where the word is sown: when they hear, Satan immediately comes and takes away the word that is sown in them. And these are the ones sown on rocky ground: the ones who, when they hear the word, immediately receive it with joy. And they have no root in themselves, but endure for a while; then, when tribulation or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately they fall away. And others are the ones sown among thorns. They are those who hear the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and the desires for other things enter in and choke the word, and it proves unfruitful. But those that were sown on the good soil are the ones who hear the word and accept it and bear fruit, thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold.”

A Lamp Under a Basket

And he said to them, “Is a lamp brought in to be put under a basket, or under a bed, and not on a stand? For nothing is hidden except to be made manifest; nor is anything secret except to come to light. If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear.” And he said to them, “Pay attention to what you hear: with the measure you use, it will be measured to you, and still more will be added to you. For to the one who has, more will be given, and from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.”

The Parable of the Seed Growing

And he said, “The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground. He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how. The earth produces by itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. But when the grain is ripe, at once he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come.”

Mark 4:1-29 — English Standard Version

No God, no rights? Got that right. Spot on!

Sadly, it’s going to take the unfolding of all Biblical prophecy for billions to learn this truth.

Ken Pullen, A CROOKED PATH, Friday, February 3rd, 2023

No God, No Rights

Thursday, February 02, 2023

By Dr. Jerry Newcombe

Reprinted from The Stand

When Vice President Kamala Harris gave a speech on the 50^th anniversary of “Roe v. Wade” about a week ago, she infamously left out the Creator – when talking about our rights. One wag told me, “Hey, at least Kamala didn’t say, we ‘are created by … you know, the thing,’” as did her boss on the campaign trail.

She also left out the “right to life.” But does this oversight matter? I addressed her “right to life” omission in a previous piece, but what about leaving out the Creator? Who cares?

We all should. The essence of America is self-rule under God. Leave out either part, and we end up with tyranny. Without God as the secure source of our rights, from whence come those rights?

Thomas Jefferson said, and you can see this quote in the Jefferson Memorial:

“And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God?”

Why does God matter? The late Clay Christensen was a Harvard Business professor who hosted a 90-second video segment that brilliantly shows why He matters.

Christensen says that ultimately we must choose between internal versus external restraint. In explaining to a visiting student from China how religion benefits American society by bolstering morality, Christensen makes the point that we can’t hire enough police to make people good. But democracy has greatly benefited through the internal restraints that religion provides.

William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania, would concur. He once noted, “If we will not be governed by God, we must be governed by tyrants.”

Within a few years of America’s revolt against British rule, the French had their revolution. Some like to compare the American with the French Revolution. They were totally different because of the God factor. The American Revolution was pro-God. The French Revolution was anti-God. That is the difference in a nutshell.

For the documentaries in my Foundation of American Liberty series for Providence Forum, I had the privilege to interview Dennis Prager, the founder of PragerU. At one point in the interview, he contrasted these two turbulent events.

He told me,

“The American Revolution and French Revolution is the battle in the United States.  Which revolution will prevail? … They loathe the idea of God in the French Revolution; the secular republic was the ideal. In America, they believed in secular government, but in a God-based society, because rights come from God in America. And you can only have liberty if you have God.”

Prager pointed out that this was not a “faith statement” so much as a “logical” one: “People will either feel accountable for their behavior to God or the state. Those are your two choices. It is an absurdity to believe they’ll be good if they’re accountable only to themselves. If you’re only accountable to yourself, you will always justify what you do.”

And so he concludes, “God is the ultimate issue.”

Take the issue of the value of human life. When you remove God from the equation, life becomes cheap. Because we’re made in the image of God, human life has value.

Human beings are different than animals, says the Bible. Recently I read portions of a great book, The Death of Humanity: And The Case For Life” by history professor Dr. Richard Weikart, who wrote the classic book, From Darwin to Hitler.

Dr. Weikart writes,

“Western society is in deep trouble today. Once we identify some segments of humanity as ‘life unworthy of life’ or ‘sub-human,’ to use phrases commonly used before and during the Nazi period, we have jettisoned any basis for valuing humans as humans. We have effectively undermined all human rights, because now we can decide which humans have rights and which do not.”

In contrast, the founders of America said in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and among these are the right to life.” The first right they listed is the right to life.

In the Declaration, the signers mention God four times, including their appeal “to the Supreme Judge of the World for the Rectitude of our Intentions,” referring to Jesus, whom God, the Bible says, has appointed to judge us all one day.

But if there’s no Creator, as some politicians seem to think, why should there be any human right? As retired Congressman Ron Paul once noted,

“There is only one kind of freedom and that’s individual liberty. Our lives come from our Creator and our liberty comes from our Creator. It has nothing to do with government granting it.”