Freedom

America, the land of the free and the home of the brave is no longer free because its people are no longer brave.  How did this happen?  Why are we less brave than we were a century or two ago?  It is because we no longer have the faith we had then.  Without faith it is impossible to please God and without pleasing God we cannot remain free.   Yes, freedom is a gift God gives to His obedient children and takes away when they disobey.  This was the case with Ancient Israel and is the case today here in America.  Why so?  Is God so mean and strict that He immediately punishes those that disobey.  Not at all.  He has great patience with us and punishes us because it’s the only language we understand.  We are very much like unruly children that only respond to physical discipline.

How did this happen?  How did we sink so low?  It was a consequence of our extreme laziness and our failure to really study God’s Word.  This has made many Christians an easy target for Satan’s lies that appeared in a book that was written over a century ago. 

This book is known as the Scofield Bible.  It is an ordinary King James Bible with Scofield’s notes embedded within its text.  This combination of God’s Word and Scofield’s immediately adjacent explanation was irresistible to Cod’s then extremely weak people.  Two or more generations were strongly affected by the lies in this book.  They were led away from the true God and drawn to a new god, one that Satan and Scofield gave them.

As  a result of a very skillful deception,  many of God’s people now actually believe that God revised His plan for this world.  They believe He will not wait for a fully Christian world as He promised He would but will instead bring it to an end very soon.  This supposed revision of God’s plans of course has seriously impacted the evangelistic efforts of those that believed the lie.  They reasoned: What difference would a few souls make when so many will go to Hell regardless of how hard we work? 

So Satan looks at all that has transpired since his servant did his evil work and is filled with glee.  Well done good and faithful servant he declares.  We have succeeded in bringing God’s work to a virtual halt, to a tiny fraction of what it was before.  This would have been impossible a century or two earlier but God’s people had grown so weak that Satan’s lies were able to deceive a great many of them. 

So here we are a century later and many of God’s people are trapped in a bail-out mentality that many of them still sincerely believe is correct.  The Christian world the previous generations worked for so faithfully has long been forgotten.  Was all the effort they applied toward making the world a Christian world just a waste?  Why did God do this to us? they might ask. 

The answer is no, God never needs to and never does change His mind.  The problem is not with God but with Scofield.  Scofield’s god is not the God of the Bible.  It is Satan’s distortion of what God really said.  It is past time for God’s people to wake up and see they’ve been following a pied piper that has led them far astray from God’s truth. 

Sadly, it appears that this generation will probably not wake up in time to prevent a political takeover of this nation and the entire world as well.  A reawakening will come but not in time to prevent a complete collapse of the current governmental system.  It does not appear that God’s people will wake up in time to prevent it.  They need to feel the pain of God’s judgment before they even begin to see their great error and are driven to repent. Real recovery may be generations away.