Confusion is His Game

Recently, we've all been bombarded by lies.  If it isn't the news media, it's our breathless brothers and sisters with the latest conspiracy theory. If it's not the Illuminati, it's the Bilderberg conspiracy, the Rothchild's, the Rockerfellers, the Merovingians or the Jewish bankers. People you thought were wise counselors seem to be led off down paths that all have one thing in common. They are paths that stray from the light and delve into dark places. Jesus is not the subject of these elaborate stories, though He may be mentioned as justification for such flights of fancy, but Christ is not the center of the story.

We need to be so careful here at the end, for Satan has had millennia to work out his schemes and he deludes himself that they are almost come to fruition. Over and over he's tried to make things work on this Earth the way he argued way back in the beginning that things ought to go. You don't have to go very far in Earth's history to see a pattern in which layers or hierarchies of authority between the people (aka, the masses, the proletariat, the collective) and some central Earthly authority. This is rather different from the single layer from human to God governance that Christianity teaches. Sadly, power attracts the corruptible and again and again, humans layer the church government with ever more and more elaborate hierarchies inserted between the Lord and his children.

All around us we see the signs that Christ's coming is imminent. But we are warned that "The devil our adversary walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour."*  If we wish to survive the time of trouble ahead of us, we must be wary of the deceptions laid before us like so many land mines. 

Lucifer has been a liar from the moment he arrived on Earth. His first lie was, "You shall not surely die." That wasn't what God said, of course. But Satan deceives by flattery. He told Eve she could be like a god. He tells you that you are smarter and better than all the stupid schlubs around you. He tells you that you understand things no one else does, especially all those ordinary folk that are so much less "aware" than you are. Lucifer is a brilliant deceiver. 

Jesus says the truth shall set you free. It's a very good idea to go to the source of Truth and keep yourself regularly infused. When you are wandering about the world, beware. Before you latch onto some conspiracy theory, especially if it feeds your ego, remember, as the old spiritual puts it, "Satan is an evil charmer. Shut the door, keep out the devil."

Paul is even more direct with regard to spending time looking into dark places. "...it is disgraceful even to speak of the things which are done by them in secret. But all things become visible when they are exposed by the light, for everything that becomes visible is light. For this reason it says, 'Awake, sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.'”**

Seek the truth. If some conspiracy theory attracts your attention be very careful. Do not rush to attribute the events on the nightly news to some brilliant human plot to control the world. We have been told who is plotting against us. Much of what seems to be some diabolical plot, is simply the shared interests and the similar lusts for power of wicked people. It is also the stupidity of those steeped in vanity, sin and selfishness that creates what seems like a dangerous plot to harm us.

Angels stand behind us to lead us safely through the valleys of the shadow of death. We need fear no evil. For He is with us. His angels surround us. We need what is available to us in His Word and no other secret "truths". For in conspiracy theories, there be dragons.

© 2021 by Tom King

*   1 Peter 5:8
** Ephesians 5: 12-14

We Have Almost Reached the Deciding Moment

 

We've just about reached every corner of the Earth what with radio, TV, air, train, bus and auto travel, the Internet, the printed word and other media. My church has established missions on the ground in 212 out of the 235 nations of the world and by radio and Internet we've covered them all. It's getting close to the point that we can say with our fellow Christians that we've actually preached the gospel to the whole world.

Meanwhile, Satan has used those same tools to deceive multitudes, to create weapons capable of turning Earth into a molten lake of fire, something Revelation talks about. At one moment in history we stand almost ready to go home and almost ready to destroy the Earth utterly. This is the moment. Go tell it on the mountain folks. Not much time left.

Yours in Christ,

 

Tom King

AF Doesn't Archive These - How We Got the Interstate Highway System

© Amazing Fact Devotional - May 29, 2021

AN AMAZING FACT: After World War I, leaders in Washington became concerned about the state of the nation’s roads. The automobile was still a relatively new invention, so most transcontinental travel depended on a few train tracks spanning the country. The U.S. War Department wanted to know if the nation’s roads could handle coast-to-coast movements of Army units by road. As a test, the Transcontinental Motor Convoy—some 80 military vehicles and 280 soldiers—took an epic road trip from Washington, D.C. to California. The starting date was July 7, 1919.

Like the cavalry of old, Army scouts would ride in advance of the convoy to check out the conditions that lay just ahead, except they were mounted on Harley-Davidsons instead of horses. The convoy traveled over dirt roads, rutted paths, winding mountain trails, and shifting desert sands roughly along the route of present-day Interstate 80.

Many areas were nearly impassable, and the men often had to push or pull the heavy trucks along through the summer heat. The vehicles frequently broke down, got stuck in quicksand and mud, and sank when roads and bridges collapsed under them. In spite of the hardships, 62 days after it left Washington, D.C., the convoy reached San Francisco. It had covered 3,251 miles, averaging 58 miles a day at an average speed of 6 mph. The official report of the War Department concluded that the existing roads in the United States were “absolutely incapable of meeting the present-day traffic requirements.”

One of the Army officers on the convoy was 28-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Dwight D. Eisenhower, who later said the roads they encountered “varied from average to non-existent.” Eisenhower never forgot this grueling experience, and one of the most important things he did after becoming president was to create the interstate highway system. Construction began in 1956, and the entire interstate system now has a total length of 46,837 miles. It’s the largest highway system in the world and the largest public works project in history.

Did you know the Bible speaks of an army of highway workers that will go before the Lord? “The voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God’” (Isaiah 40:3). Not only did John the Baptist fulfill this prophecy, but we too may help make straight roads that guide others to heaven.

 

KEY BIBLE TEXTS

Go through, go through the gates; prepare ye the way of the people; cast up, cast up the highway; gather out the stones; lift up a standard for the people. Isaiah 62:10

Note from Tom: The Interstate Highway System is often cited as an example of socialism in action. It actually wasn't. It was Americans and their government fixing a problem together that everyone agreed needed fixing. Each state participates in maintaining the Interstates. We all contribute to it. We do this because it enables commerce in the national marketplace and contributes to making us all a bit wealthier in the process. The Interstates were primarily designed to help move troops in case of an invasion (we learned about the dangers of that in WWII. It had the added benefit of allowing commercial and private citizens to move easily about the the country. It was the sort of thing the Constitution said we were creating a government for - in this case to provide for the common defense.

Tom King

Answer to a Critic of Ellen White

 

I recommended a book by SDA historian George R. Knight called "Ellen White's Afterlife" in which he thoroughly discusses the issues the anti-Adventist crowd has presented here on social media. Let me address some of the points one by one.

 

1. Ellen White never claimed to be equal to scripture much less greater. She told pastors not to quote her from the pulpit as an authority. She described herself as a messenger, not a prophet. Others later on made that claim about her. She did not.

 

2. Her writings always point to the Bible as the source of all truth. She always sent people back to the Bible when she offered advice or a message she received in vision.

 

3. To outright reject her claim to having visions is to dismiss scripture's prophecy (Acts 2: 17) that, "In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams." Bible says it will happen.

 

4. Her use of sources credited and uncredited is described clearly in the forward to Great Controversy. She followed what was common publishing practice in her day. When concern was expressed about how her lack of written sources might be perceived, she altered the book in later editions to include references. She was quite frank that in many cases she found a passage in her reading that said what she'd seen or wanted to say better than she could herself. She had secretaries who edited her work and, as I said, she changed some things in later editions, especially if she found better more accurate sources.

 

5. She never claimed to be infallible. Many things she wrote were for individuals and not for public consumption. There was a doctor and his wife (also a doctor) in Australia that Dr. Knight described as "dying of health reform." Sister Ellen wrote them and told them to drink grape juice and 2 raw eggs for breakfast each morning to recover their health. They were doing health reform over-zealously and missing parts of the message. She did not recommend this for all, but in this case it seemed to have saved the couple's lives.

 

6. Of course her health messages were similar to others ideas. If something is good for you, it should be advised by more than one person. She advised people to stop tobacco use a hundred years before doctors finally weighed in on the subject. She preached temperance before AA. She had a knack for getting it right even when it went against the ideas of other health reformers at the time. At one SDA college where she had lunch in the cafeteria, Mrs. White asked for a salt shaker. The waitress said the school no longer provided salt because it was unhealthy. They didn't even use it in cooking. Mrs. White told the waitress, "Please bring me some salt. My Bible says it is good and I trust it's counsel over man's."

 

7. The final words of her final sermon shortly before her death were, "Brothers and Sisters," she said lifting her Bible over her head, "Unto you I commend this book." She advised pastors to teach from the Word and not to quote Sister White. She once complained that it made her skin crawl when she heard someone preface their remarks with "Sister White says...." She got to where she had to almost quit giving people verbal advice, specifically for that person alone, because she often heard it repeated from the pulpit the next Sabbath. This she objected to strenuously.

 

8 After her death, GC president AG Daniels, who knew her and her views, called a conference of educators together to discuss how to use Sister White's writing with students. Daniels was adamant that she never wanted to be used as a club to enforce any idea for which there was not thorough grounding in Scripture. When one conference president wrote her demanding that she give the brethren advice on a hotly debated passage in Galatians as to the meaning of "The Daily", she flatly refused. She told them to go back and pray some more and that God would lead them aright.

9. There was a time in the 40s and 50s when a theologian named Andraeson promoted something called Last Days Theology, which was the idea that Christ's sacrifice was not a completed work, but that humans in the last days would live perfect lives for a time without an intercessor and that it was necessary for humans to prove that one could live perfectly on his own hook. This is contradicted in scripture and comes primarily from one misunderstood passage in a single book which was a compilation which Sister Ellen did not like the idea of were she not involved in the selection of the writings. Andraeson became disruptive with his insistence on Last Day perfection being necessary to justify God somehow, that the church had to withdraw his ministerial credentials. On his deathbed he apologized for the disruption he caused. Unfortunately, his influence was very widespread and it took some controversy within the church in order to resolve the issue. The church now is united on the idea that atonement for His children was completed at the cross. The Sanctuary doctrine and the investigative judgment we believe is a final closing of the books that takes place as Christ comes. The Sanctuary doctrine has far more support in Scripture than the secret rapture doctrine and the immortality of the soul.

 

10. The Adventist Church can support it's theological doctrines from Scripture. We don't have to explain to our members as to why we are allowed to disobey the only commandment that says "Remember" as the first word. We don't have to explain the absence of an immortal soul, an ever-burning hell and a commandment to change the Sabbath to Sunday anywhere in the New Testament.

 

11. We Adventists do a healthy diet as far as possible. Not all of us eat a good diet but in repeated studies, among all Adventists we live 9 or 10 years longer than everyone else. We've taken much from the Old Testament about diet going back to the Garden of Eden where the original diet was fruits and vegetables with grains added after they got kicked out. We reason that if our body is the Temple of the Lord, we should probably treat it well.

 

You can go to church anywhere you like. You may even find your way to heaven without ever darkening the door of an SDA church. Adventists believe Jesus will take home people from all corners of Christendom and beyond. We even believe that some will be saved that never heard the name of Christ, but who searched for Him with all their hearts. But there is no excuse for some Christians who seek to tear down fellow Christians, calling them a cult, calling Ellen White a false prophet and accusing us of a whole horde of things without evidence. That's all I've got to say. If you don't like us, you are not required to fellowship with us. Your salvation is between you and your God. You preach what you believe about God's character and we'll do the same. I frankly believe that when Jesus said the dead sleep, that he meant that. I believe when Paul said "In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed" that that's exactly how it works. 

 

The God I met while studying Scripture would not torture any one for all eternity. Satan was the one who said "Thou shalt not surely die". and we don't lop a week off the 70 weeks prophecy and move it 2000 years later to hide the identity of the Beast power. 

 

We must have something right or our fellow Christians would not be so anxious to discredit us, I think. We hope you find your way to Him as we too have that blessed hope. We'll see you there.

© 2021 by Tom King

Towards a Lost Sheep Ministry

The reward of seeking lost sheep.

When I was working in Tyler, Texas during my nonprofit days, I saw a survey we did for a HUD grant of the local "demographic."  In it, they included an item that identified people by religious affiliation. I was shocked to see that of the people who said they were Adventist, there were half again the number of professed Adventists as there were Adventists who were actually attending the 3 Tyler SDA churches. 

 

Some likely listed themselves as SDAs because that was the last church they'd had anything to do with. I suspect many were maintaining their connection to the church through the 3ABN TV UHF ground station the local church maintained in the community. Others were occasional attendees but had never put their names on the books. It's a sad statistic that of the ninety and nine of our flock there were 50 more missing and wandering around kind of lost.

Sadly, ministry to the lost of our own flock is too often neglected these days in favor of evangelistic meetings that bring in new members. I wonder if some of the reluctance to seek after our lost members has anything to do with the fact that some of them were troublesome sorts of members in the first place and our church officials are not anxious to reignite old fires. Still, our displaced and isolated members are a fertile field for harvest.

Still that one lost sheep is by definition, a troublesome sheep, wandering off from the flock. With many of these lost sheep having caused the shepherds all sorts of trouble., the thought may be, "Better to let sleeping sheep lie." 

 

Just as new technology has improved search and rescue techniques, so new tech has given us new tools for spiritual search and rescue. If Jesus' parable about the lost sheep is any indication of the relative importance of spiritual search and rescue, then it seems like it ought to be a ministry that is a fixture or our church programs. It seems there should be more of a focus on this neglected ministry. 

Now with the Internet and the ability to inexpensively livestream our services we have a priceless opportunity to reach out to disconnected members, shut-ins and hereditary Adventists in the community who have slipped away.With texting, mobile phones in everyone's pocket and the means to use social media to keep in communication with one another, there are abundant avenues to woo back our lost lambs.

Being a shut-in myself has opened my eyes to the possibility of ministries to recover lost members and engage our shut-ins. Ron Halvorsen Sr did a thing at the Keene, Texas church when he was there, where he bought and had donated a small fleet of school buses. We fanned out through the countryside picking up kids for Wednesday night youth meetings and picking up elderly and disabled folk for prayer meeting and church. Through word of mouth and by direct mail we let people know that we would come for them to bring them to church. We put young people with guitars on the buses and sang our way through the hills and dales of Johnson County picking up kids and adults on Sabbath on on Wednesday night. The church was packed to overflowing. We went from an average 42 attendance at prayer meeting to over 1000. We went from one service to two.We trained the Academy and College kids to organize, plan and run the youth meetings. We taught classes in story-telling to young volunteers. Musicians just showed up anxious to help and to be a part of some wonderful music. 

 

The church grew dramatically, much to the chagrin of some of the board members. There are always some that hate the idea of all those new and energetic members. I say new members, because in seeking our lost members, we wound up finding dozens and dozens of new ones who were swept up in our nets. Adventist kids often brought along friends and neighbors on the buses. The Wednesday Youth meetings were like an all year Vacation Bible School.

I think every SDA church needs a lost sheep ministry. The Graham church here in Washington did a thing where the deacons and board members and volunteers went round to take communion to our shut-ins. It was a lovely idea and a blessing to those of us who are isolated from our church family due to health, disability or transportation issues.

Sometimes we think witnessing is going around passing out "literature" and throwing evangelistic meetings. But it's not. In all of scripture I have found only three things we have been told to do in order to find our way to heaven.  Study, pray and then share what you've learned from the first two. In sharing what you've learned, you'll find that what you've learned is heavy on treating others the way you want to be treated, caring for the sick, the disabled, the widows, orphans and elderly. Witness means getting out your hammer and building your elderly friend a ramp so he can get his wheelchair out of the house, installing handrails in her shower, mowing someone's grass or repairing a sink.

The really beautiful thing is that doing all this outreach to our lost sheep and to our neighbors as well, we help save souls, including, surprisingly, our own. There's nothing so good for depression and unhappiness as turning your hand to helping another, especially if you do it with no thought of reward or payment.

In these days when we see prophecy being fulfilled right and left, it will not be having the right politics that will bring us through these times of trouble. It will be how we build communities of faith, how we lift each other up, and how we pull together as sons and daughters of God. 

Think about it. What can you do to find a lost sheep. It may be simply listening to someone's troublesd. It could be running an errand for someone. It might be as simple as inviting someone to go with you on an adventure. If each day you ask God to bring you to the witness stand that you may tell of your own experience with Him, God will guide you to His lost sheep that you might show them that He loves them through your own life. 

Yours in Christ,

Tom King

© 2021

Is it Wrong for a Christian to Be Involved in Politics

 

A preacher friend and relative, counseled all of us to not involve ourselves in politics in his Sabbath morning homily today. It was at that point that I realized he'd done stopped preaching and done started meddling!

Seriously though, as a professional journalist/blogger/author whose specialty is politics, humor (two branches of the same field), religion (make that 3 branches), vegetarian cookery and how-to articles, I find it difficult to give up my political writing. This is especially so since I firmly believe that modern progressive politics are working very hard to create the world we were warned about in Revelation. I personally have come to believe from my study of current events, political discourse and the Bible that there is one political group that will get our nation down the road to hell far faster than the other. Revelation talks about a three-fold union between the Dragon (Satan/Pagan Rome), the Beast (the inheritor of the power of pagan Rome - see Emperor Constantine) and the False Prophet. Sounds suspiciously like some sort of global new world order to me.

As a result of my studies, my political blogs tend to be as much about religious matters like the Second Coming and the 7 last plagues as they are about who should win the next election, since at this point in history, politics and religion have become so intertwined. And anti-religion is every bit as much a religion as any denomination. They have shared rituals like burning down electronics stores after looting them, setting forest fires, shooting people with MAGA hats, and screaming Marxist claptrap in the faces of people smaller than they are (not to mention knocking down little old people). They have shared beliefs like collectivism, and shared values like perversion and anarchy. Also as a citizen of a nation whose constitution clearly states this is a government of the people, by the people and for the people, that makes each of us leaders of the government. The state, our founding fathers decided, belongs to us, not we to it as the collectivists would have us believe.

The advice this morning's speaker quoted came from one of our church founders, whose advice to avoid politics was, I believe, aimed at Gospel Workers (that being the name of the book the quotation was drawn from). The counselor in question also once publicly called out the president of the United States for not making the Civil War about slavery - she said God wouldn't bless the North if he didn't. She was an abolitionist at the time which was a very prominent and trouble-making 19th century political movement. It can be argued that the abolition movement was a direct cause of the Civil WAr. It seems that even back then politics and religion had some shared values. Turns out she was prophetic about making it about slavery once it got started. The North struggled in the early years of the war, until Lincoln stopped talking about a settlement that left slavery intact and went right for the Emancipation Proclamation solution. Immediately after that, the tide of the war turned in favor of the Union.

I feel like there is still a role for watchmen on the wall whose responsibility is to tell the truth to kings.  A lot of God's servants have gotten in trouble for doing just that. The kings didn't appreciate their meddling in politics and some prophets paid with their lives in singularly unpleasant manners.  So like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Nahum, Elijah, John the Baptist, Elisha, Joel, Samuel and other minor and not so minor prophets, all of whom got in trouble for challenging the centrist governments of their day (they called the politburo presidents kings back then), I feel called to challenge the centrist oppressive government of today and support those who fight against those who would take our freedoms, shut down our churches and persecute those who disagree with them. Even more so as the end of time approaches.

"Watchmen on the wall" Isaiah called them (Isaiah 62: 6). He said we shouldn't rest from watching for the approach of the enemy, nor should we be silent about it..

Just one man's opinion.....

© 2020 by Tom King

Water - One Reason I Gave Up on Atheism

Water in all 3 of its miraculous forms - liquid, solid and gas

As a young man, as young men will do, I toyed with the idea of atheism. With my limited youthful logic I thought the idea of evolution and survival of the fittest a pretty smart idea as we often do in the midst of our youth and arrogance, when like Eve, we buy into the lie that we are, by nature, immortal and that, with a bit of knowledge, we can be our own gods.

Once I learned how to reason, however, some problems soon arose with the whole idea that there is nothing out there beyond our own, horrifically flawed selves. If, in fact, we are the result of a very long series of cosmic accidents, I came to realize, that then how could we trust that our minds are even capable of real rational thought. We could be thinking we have reasoned things out by cold logic, but the fact is, our accidentally constructed "minds" could well be incapable of anything other than a crippled kind of thinking influenced more by our lack of some missing kind of perceptive ability than by reason as we think of it, if we can think rationally at all. 

So, the truth is that the "logic" by which the atheist rejects the notion of God may only be the product of a limited ability to think. We could be limited in our ability to think truly rational thoughts about anything beyond what our five senses seem to perceive. In fact, there may be an entire reality beyond the limits of our perception. Perhaps God is a pan-dimensional being we can neither see nor hear nor touch nor taste nor feel because we lack the sense organs to perceive such a being. God told Moses it was impossible for him with his limited sensor equipment to see more than his "back parts".

If could be that we are only able to perceive the results of a creature outside the strictures of 3 dimensional space when He interacts with the universe and with us lower creatures. Consider, for instance, water. Without water, life could not exist. Water is a compound made of two of the simplest of elements - hydrogen and oxygen.Water has the following unique properties.

1. It is liquid in its normal state allowing us to drink it, sail on it, water crops with it, bathe with it and cook with it.
2. Water turns to gas in response not only to boiling, but to lowered humidity levels in the air at relatively low temperatures through evaporation. 
3. Were it not for evaporation, clouds would not form, nor would precipitation redistribute fresh filtered water over the land areas of the Earth where animals and plants take it in as a necessity of survival. 
4. Also, water changes to a solid (freezes) at a temperature at which animals and plants can survive. Just before it freezes and turns into a solid, unlike every other substance on the planet.
5. Just before freezing water expands rather than contracts causing its solid form to float on it's liquid form. 
6. Were water like all other substances, it would continue to contract as it cools and sink to the bottom of the body of water exposed to freezing temperatures.
7. If ice sank rather than floated, instead of protecting life below the surface of the water from freezing temperatures above, it would fill up lakes, rivers and oceans from the bottom up.
8. Ice that sinks would eventually force the fish our onto the surface of what had become a solid block of ice instead of a body of water. Sea life would die gasping. Virtually all animal life in the water would be killed after a single hard winter. 
9. Water, by all appearances, seems unlikely to be a happy accident of physics, but rather the product of some intelligent design scheme. And, where you have a design scheme, you pretty much have to have a designer. 
10. Were you to change those two very odd properties of water, life would be unable to exist. 

It turns out that it takes an incredible amount of faith in accidents or a remarkable lack of curiosity to attribute all that to chance. Over the past century or so, as science digs deeper and deeper into the nature of the universe around us it keeps discovering that life exists by a singularly complex web of factors which increasingly like they could only have occurred on their own by a string of not just improbable, but statistically impossible complex circumstances.

CS Lewis compared it to smashing a jug of milk on the floor and hoping it gives you a map of London. As unlikely as that would be to happen, no matter how many jugs you smashed to the floor, your family cat, attracted by the crashing, could hardly guess with the brain it has, whether the delightfully tasty patterns spread across the kitchen floor accidentally appeared there as a result of the crash or if this odd superior creature sitting on the drain board taking notes might have created the mess for some unfathomable reason known only to itself. The cat, with cat--like logic might assume the milk spread itself over the floor of its own accord for the cat's enjoyment.

Not having seen you smash several jugs of milk on the floor, the cat would likely accept the miracle of the milk and commence to licking it up without further thought. Me? Because I have a human's ability to reason, could look at the milk, even if someone else at broken the jugs, not me, and detect the action of some actor who was behind it. I could probably even guess which one of my kids was responsible for the milky map of London on the kitchen floor.

So given that I would require an extremely deep sort of faith to accept that this glorious world is the accidental product of volcanoes and asteroids, I have look deeper, with an open mind and found unmistakable imprint of Him, the great designer, in even simple things like water.