He Also Supported Leprosy

Last night, I asked God to tell me why Mitt Romney–the non-Christian MORMON–lost. Soon afterward, I found myself reading Isaiah, and I remembered what I had asked for.

When I turned on my tablet Bible app, I found the following text highlighted: “I will turn My hand against you,
And thoroughly purge away your dross And take away all your alloy.” That’s Isaiah 1:25.

The KJV says “tin,” not “alloy.” I didn’t know the NJKV said “alloy” until just now. Makes me think about all the “mixed multitude” complaints my friend Aaron has made. “Alloy” would certainly make more sense than “tin.” Why would God want to get rid of a pure metal which is useful? An alloy sounds much more likely. Believers who are alloyed with the dross of the world cause a lot of our problems. Many evangelicals think Obama is wonderful, because they have an adulterous spirit. They think they can go to church on Sunday and still be cool the rest of the week. They went into voting booths last week and sold Jesus for 30 pieces of government silver.

Anyway, here is what really caught my attention. It’s from Isaiah 3:

For behold, the Lord, the Lord of hosts,
Takes away from Jerusalem and from Judah
The stock and the store,
The whole supply of bread and the whole supply of water;
The mighty man and the man of war,
The judge and the prophet,
And the diviner and the elder;
The captain of fifty and the honorable man,
The counselor and the skillful artisan,
And the expert enchanter.
“I will give children to be their princes,
And babes shall rule over them.
The people will be oppressed,
Every one by another and every one by his neighbor;
The child will be insolent toward the elder,
And the base toward the honorable.”

When a man takes hold of his brother
In the house of his father, saying,
“You have clothing;
You be our ruler,
And let these ruins be under your power,”[a]
In that day he will protest, saying,
“I cannot cure your ills,
For in my house is neither food nor clothing;
Do not make me a ruler of the people.”

For Jerusalem stumbled,
And Judah is fallen,
Because their tongue and their doings
Are against the Lord,
To provoke the eyes of His glory.
The look on their countenance witnesses against them,
And they declare their sin as Sodom;
They do not hide it.
Woe to their soul!
For they have brought evil upon themselves.

“Say to the righteous that it shall be well with them,
For they shall eat the fruit of their doings.
Woe to the wicked! It shall be ill with him,
For the reward of his hands shall be given him.
As for My people, children are their oppressors,
And women rule over them.
O My people! Those who lead you cause you to err,
And destroy the way of your paths.”

I realize this was not addressed to the US at the time it was written, but God works in patterns that repeat throughout history, and he puts them in the Bible so we will not have to repeat the punishments of those who came before us. If he did this to the Jews, he will do similar things to us.

He says he will take away food and water. That means lean times. It would not surprise me. Look what he did to Washington in the recent past. Two hurricanes and one earthquake. For a long time, I’ve prayed for God’s retribution to fall on the ungodly places instead of hitting areas like central Florida. Maybe he is listening to people like me. Anyway, this passage points to problems with the food supply.

God then says he will take away the counselor and the honorable man and so on. That means he will take away the people we should be listening to. The Romneys. He doesn’t say he’ll take away the righteous. Just the wise who might otherwise help us find our way.

Next God says, ““I will give children to be their princes, and babes shall rule over them.”

Do I even have to explain? In droves, young people waddled to the polls in sagging pants so they could vote for Obama. They know virtually nothing about him (or anything else), but he won their votes by a large margin. Their values, if you can call them that, are represented heavily in Obama’s policies. Obama appoints people who think like college freshmen clutching their first credit cards. Some are young. Many merely think (or, more accurately, fail to think) like the young. Obama himself was young when he was elected, and he has the naivete and gullibility of a preteen. The old are supposed to run the world, because they know how it works (remember the famous debate line uttered by George W. Bush). When the young are in charge, and their “ideas” shape policy, things go very, very badly.

Later, God says, “As for My people, children are their oppressors, and women rule over them.” How true. Women invariably vote for oppression. They think Uncle Sam is the best husband a girl could have. If men didn’t vote, we would already be Communists.

Next: “The people will be oppressed, every one by another and every one by his neighbor;” This is what happens when society turns upside-down. It has happened in Nazi Germany and Cuba, to name two examples. The government pits people against each other, rewarding people for informing. In countries where this has happened, adults have become afraid of their own children, because the kids are encouraged to rat them out at school. Our government is now telling us, “If you see something, say something.” During his campaign, Obama asked people to squeal on people who wrote doubleplusungood things about him on the web. Obama even tried to form his own version of the Hitler Youth, and he got a Christian jailed for making an anti-Islamic video (the pretext is irrelevant; he was investigated because of the video, not the misconduct for which he was imprisoned).

The government is also turning our neighbors into overweening government goons. Unsuccessful, uneducated people have been hired as TSA officers, to molest us when we travel.Oppression is here, and it will get worse.

“The child will be insolent toward the elder, and the base toward the honorable.” Did you see the way Obama spoke to McCain and Romney during the debates? Have you seen the filthy things Obama supporters have said before and since the election? Ignorant, unaccomplished people now presume to “school” the rest of us before the public. We have George Will and Robert Bork. The left has Beyonce and Madonna. It reminds me of what Bill Clinton said about Obama duing the 2008 campaign: “A few years ago, this guy would have been carrying our bags.” Some interpreted it as racism, but Clinton was actually making a reference to his own past, when he drove a Senator’s car in order to gain his patronage. Clinton worked his way up through the ranks. Obama had everything handed to him, and now he lectures people of superior intellect and greater experience.

God goes on to tell us that people will not want to be rulers. We’ve already seen that happen. Sarah Palin got a stomachful of the abuse and slander trashy individuals heaped on her and on her family. We are so abusive to good conservative people who volunteer to serve, surely we discourage many of them. I think it even happens in the church. My exhaustion with people from my old church was a major reason I deleted my Facebook account and started a new one. Talking to people who refuse to think is like trying to carve stone with a plastic knife.

Here’s an obvious parallel: “And they declare their sin as Sodom; they do not hide it. Woe to their soul! For they have brought evil upon themselves.” We decided homosexuality was not a disorder. Then we decided it was something we should tolerate. Then we decided it was something we should celebrate and promote. Now we’re actively punishing righteous people who disagree. You can lose your job for saying something negative about sexual sin.

Sodom had lots of sins, but homosexuality was probably the worst. In Sodom, male gangs committed homosexual rape in the streets. Some claim the main problem with Sodom was its harshness to the poor, but I think it’s safe to say that forced penetration by groups of strangers offends God more than refusing to give alms.

Socialism, embraced by the Obama crowd, is actually morally equivalent to one of the main crimes of the people of Sodom and Gomorrah. As I’ve noted in the past, these doomed peoples used to raid businesses in groups. Each person would steal an amount so small, he or she could not be arrested. It was a form of looting, grounded in covetousness. Socialism, or “social justice,” as the left calls it, is fundamentally similar. A large group of people votes for the looting of numerous individuals and businesses. Each pro-looting voter gets only a small amount of wealth from each looted entity, but the result is the destruction of businesses and inheritances (which are strongly favored in the Bible).

It used to be that people who took government money were ashamed, but now they call the loot “entitlements,” and they say the rest of us owe it to them! Incredible. “They declare their sin as Sodom; they do not hide it.”

There is one positive verse in this chapter:

Say to the righteous that it shall be well with them,
For they shall eat the fruit of their doings.
Woe to the wicked! It shall be ill with him,
For the reward of his hands shall be given him.

It looks like God will protect certain Americans. Several years ago, I heard God tell me, “This recession is not for you.” All across the US, zealous Christians have been leaving cities and moving to rural areas. It’s not an organized top-down movement. The Holy Spirit has moved individuals, separately, to get out. This verse explains it.

God is leading many of us to higher ground. When things get bad, there will be rioting and looting, and as always, the mobs will do most of the damage near their own homes. They will rob, rape, and murder the people next door, before they’ll get in cars and pillage the countryside. Rural areas will be a lot safer, until the government itself gets involved in violent persecution and confiscation.

I do not believe most Christians will be safe. Most Christians reject the Holy Spirit and live however they want. But I think those who live in communion with God–the people who will qualify for the Rapture–are protected. From time to time, as persecution increases, we will be martyred in large numbers. But I believe that will happen to two types of people: those who don’t know God well enough to hear a warning, and those whom he warns, yet who choose to lay down their lives and leave this earth.

We should look at the story of Lot for guidance. When God decided to wipe out Sodom, he pulled Lot into his house (through two angels) and struck his enemies with blindness. The predatory gays outside groped for the door and couldn’t find it, which is actually a good metaphor for people who can’t enter the kingdom of God. Similar things must have happened in Noah’s time. Christians don’t have much information about Noah’s dealings with his neighbors, but God must have protected him from them, because common sense says they would have stormed the ark after the waters rose a certain amount. God allowed Jesus to walk through a crowd of angry Nazarenes who wanted to murder him. If you’re spending time in the Spirit and dedicating your life to God, you probably will be fine, until and unless a time comes when God chooses to allow you to be sacrificed. By that time, you’ll be ready to go, as Paul and Peter were.

In the movie Defending Your Life, Albert Brooks played a dead soul who was on trial, and the lawyers bragged that they used higher percentages of their brains than we do. One was “clocked” at 51%. When Brooks asked questions about their big brains, one of them said something like, “When you use more than 5% of your brain, you don’t want to be on Earth.” That’s how it will be for people who are living by the Spirit. Increasingly, when we are granted reprieves, they will seem like extensions of our sentences.

I don’t understand why God allowed me to feel that Romney would win, but it may be that God did not choose Obama until election day. It may be that if enough of us had prayed, God would have spared us Obama, and the faith I felt was just my inadequate contribution. I can’t say. But I’m confident that God will explain it to me sooner or later. He has proven himself to exist, without a shadow of a doubt, so I can’t be too discouraged by bumps in the road.

Isaiah says God will purify and restore the Jews to whom his prophecy applies. I would hesitate to apply that to us. Israel is important. America is peripheral and ephemeral. We are relatively insignificant. We do not have the same promises Israel has. God can’t let Israel suffer final defeat, because it would violate his covenant with Abraham. If he chastises Israel, he has to relent and rebuild. If he chastises America, he can allow us to be slaughtered to the last man. Our survival is conditional, unlike that of Israel. It may be that we will change, but our record of stupidity suggests otherwise.

I feel better about the election now. I thought it was man thwarting God’s will, but now I think it was God, thwarting man’s will. Most of us wanted Romney (the cult member) to save us, but God chose to punish us with Obama (the false Christian). God wrecked Romney’s ground game, which was expected to be powerful. He blessed the Democrats’ ground game, which was supposed to be a shambles. He sent a hurricane that somehow helped Obama, even though Obama’s response caused terrible suffering. Now we have the President God wants us to have, and Americans are going to suffer because of that President’s incompetence, vanity, and bitterness.

I don’t know whether God gave us a non-Christian candidate to punish us, or he punished us for choosing a non-Christian candidate. Either way, we did ourselves in.

A small number of Americans turned to God. The Tea Party people, for example. But many Republicans decided the Christian right was too scary. They decided to be man-pleasers. Romney was our reward, just as McCain was our reward in 2008.

There is nowhere to run, if America has truly turned the corner. If socialism prevails here, Satan has the entire world, pretty much. People used to come here to escape, but those days may be over. The only lifeboat country of any significance will be Israel, and it will only be open to Jews.

By the way, Isaiah predicted wars for people who turn from God, and Isaiah 4:1 says a time will come when seven women will try to wed a single man. That doesn’t bode very well for our future. A shortage of men usually comes from war, and if it gets to the Isaiah 4:1 stage, it means war on one’s own soil. No country would send 6/7 of its men abroad to fight. It may refer to civil war. It would be counterproductive, expensive, and irrational for an enemy to kill off 6/7 of the male workforce of a conquered nation. It could happen, though, in a civil war, where the violence is more personal and passionate.

The natural approach has failed, so my advice is to build an ark the supernatural way. Get baptized with the Spirit. Pray in tongues. Submit. Give to the poor. Study. Fast. Get to know God, and see if you can get him to deliver you. Beyond that, I have no advice. We’ve tried the other stuff, and it hasn’t worked.