Confirmation

I had a remarkable experience today. My pastor preached about the upcoming persecution Christians will face. He says it will be coming from gays.

I have been saying this for what? Two years? And I don’t tell my pastor what to preach. It just happened. God told me, and then he told my pastor. We didn’t conspire.

The Bible tells of a “mark of the beast.” This is some kind of sign that will identify people as followers of the beast, a Satanic leader (believed to be a human being) who will rule the world before Jesus returns. If you have the mark of the beast on your right hand or on your forehead, you’ll be able to buy and sell. Otherwise, you’re out. So you’ll starve to death, or at least you’ll become marginalized and impoverished. Exactly like the Jews under Hitler.

It’s starting to look like the mark may be a rainbow tattoo.

In Colorado, baker Jack Phillips refused to bake wedding cakes for homosexuals. He is a Christian. Obviously, baking a wedding cake for two men is a tacit endorsement of homosexual marriage, and a Christian cannot, in good conscience, create such a cake. It is extremely cruel to force a Christian to participate in a rite celebrating sexual perversion. But Colorado has an unconstitutional law prohibiting businesses from refusing to serve people based on their sexual orientation, and a local judge has ruled that it trumps a Christian’s religious freedom.

The solution? Mr. Phillips no longer bakes wedding cakes. Fortunately for him, he will not need to, because now he has hordes of Christians (and probably even some gays) buying other things from him strictly to protest the ruling. But what if all of his business revolved around weddings? What if he were a wedding planner or singer? He’d be out of a job.

As it is, he will be forced to attend sensitivity classes which are virtually certain to amount to religious persecution, in that they will require him to endorse homosexuality (directly or indirectly) in order to pass.

This is amazing. It’s like sending a Muslim to a class where they force him to eat pork. And it’s happening in America! In 2000, no one would have believed this kind of anti-Christian government action was possible.

Back then, Barack Obama was against gay marriage. How quickly his worldview reversed. It’s a wonderful convenience, being able to change your mind that fast. It worked so well for the French under the Vichy regime.

My pastor mentioned this case today. He said he didn’t know why he was saying it, but he predicted that in the future, people will simply be put out of business if they don’t support the sin of homosexual relations. I think he’s right. It may be possible for American Christians to stop it through prayer and cursing, but it will surely happen in countries where Christians are rarer or weaker.

We asked for this when we started involving government in the business of remedying discrimination. It’s like the old story about a woman who got a cat to chase a mouse. Then she needed a dog to get rid of the cat. After a few more steps, she found herself buying an elephant. Anti-discrimination laws were the cat. Now the gay elephant is threatening to turn us into untouchables.

Am I saying I’m against Title VII and similar laws? Maybe. I’m not sure. I do know that we often turn to government to solve problems that would have solved themselves in less harmful ways.

Does anyone seriously think that we needed laws to end discrimination? Without Uncle Sam’s “help,” would we still have whites-only public schools in 2014? Surely not. The laws reflected change in public opinion, and that change would eventually have swept the nation. It might have added five or ten years to the process, and that would have resulted in a great deal of suffering, but things would have changed without the government’s clumsy, inept actions, and the government, which is heartless and stupid, would now have less control over our lives. It might have been a good trade.

Now we have a pile of laws banning racial and religious discrimination, and almost nobody minds that, but gays have managed to turn these laws into hammers for crushing Christians. They say being gay is just like being black. Run that canard by some black people, if you’re brave enough. Black is a skin color. Homosexual relations are acts. It’s not the same. No mainstream religion ever said being black was a sin. The Mormons came pretty close, but even they had no issues with doing business with black people.

My pastor told us we needed to discern the winds that were coming against us. Overall, Christians live in victory when they do things right, but sometimes very bad things happen to us because we belong to Jesus. Peter was crucified upside-down, after watching the Romans crucify his wife. The Romans burned Christians alive. There is no point in listing more atrocities. They are well known, and they continue today, especially in Muslim countries.

He’s right. God does wonderful things for Christians, and he gives us the power to prevail in every situation, up to a point. Sometimes he permits us to be killed, jailed, and so on. But according to the Bible, we are supposed to see those things coming. The Bible says God does nothing without telling the prophets first. Most Christian churches deny modern prophets, so they have no idea what’s going on. But some of us still acknowledge prophets and listen to them.

Fred Stone, the father of minister Perry Stone, made some predictions before he died, and one of them was that a time of great spiritual confusion was coming. He said the only people who would know which way to go would be Christians who pray in tongues. My pastor doesn’t know a lot about Fred Stone, but he said the same thing, in so many words. People will be weak, and like Peter on the night before the crucifixion, they will fall away. Some will decide homosexuality is fine, in acts of desperate rationalization. Others will just lie in order to live. The only way to stay true to God in the face of persecution and murder will be through the transforming power of the Holy Spirit, and that means praying in tongues daily.

I look around the web, and I see a lot of comments about the current wave of persecution. Many Americans are amazed! Apparently they thought gays wanted peace. That’s like saying the Palestinians will be satisfied with one more acre of Israel. The goal of many gays–the goal of the great spirit that pulls their strings–is to get rid of Christianity. They want to remove the Body of Christ from the earth. This is the very definition of “antichrist.”

People thought they could give up one Biblical prohibition (found in both Testaments) and have no problems. Now many are starting to see that they gave a great deal of control over their lives to a very loud 3% of the population. Will they rise up and push back? They haven’t so far.

The prosperity preachers are going to have a disastrous harvest if the persecution increases. They haven’t taught people anything, except how to give them their life savings. Their flocks will either turn on them or go pro-gay. I’m sure many of the pastors will go pro-gay. Some will just plain go gay. The ministry has a strange way of drawing homosexuals, and a gay man who is not Spirit-led (there is no other kind) can serve his whole life and not realize how wrong he is. We’ve already seen charismatic pastors come out of the closet after sex scandals. Surely more will follow.

One nice thing about getting really close to God is that you can get a surprising amount of protection. You may be martyred some day, but until then, you should be able to do very well. And it will certainly be better than serving Satan, who abuses his people in a capricious and unpredictable manner.

We have no record of Jesus having any problems or defeats whatsoever until he was arrested. John lived to be very old, and ancient accounts tell us that when the Romans boiled him in oil, he was not harmed in the least. If you know what your weapons are, and you use them, you should be able to insulate yourself until things really go south. I know the apostles sometime suffered badly, but we should not assume them to be perfect models. Jesus said followers would rise who would outdo his own achievements. We haven’t seen them yet. The apostles didn’t do it, so he had to be referring to people living much later. The greatest Christians have yet to be seen. Don’t assume you won’t be one of them.

On the one hand, we have some Biblical stories about a few beatings, but on the other, we have Jesus, who said he had overcome the world and that it would not hurt us. Given these facts, I am inclined to believe Jesus and assume the apostles could have done better. Perhaps they went to places the Spirit told them not to visit. Or maybe they were warned that they would suffer briefly and ordered to go anyway, and they went.

For the most part, it seems that strong Christians have very good lives, although they may be killed in unpleasant ways. Personally, I would not measure the quality of my life by the suffering I encounter on the day of my death. If things go well until then, I will consider myself blessed and victorious. And think of what comes after a brief period of pain. In paradise, the least of us will be greater than the failed cherub who rules the earth. We will be completely out of his reach. No pain. No aging. He will seem contemptible to us, if he doesn’t already. Think how wonderful that will be.

If the actions of the gay army scare you, get up every day and curse them with failure. Pray for God to destroy their works. Speak revelation to them so they might change. Speak defeat to the spirits that rule them. And be honest when you talk about the issue. Say you stand with God. Don’t let other Christians feel like they’re cut off.

I’ve already said way too much to hope to escape notice. It’s out there, like college girl’s naked spring break pictures. I can’t really turn back. If things heat up, I’ll stick out like a sore thumb. I won’t be afraid. I won’t shut up. The strongest being in the universe is with me. Trying to please man is an exercise in futility in the best of times, and in our persecution-heavy future, it will also be a ticket to destruction.