America: the old cowboy that rides off into the sunset

By Michael Bresciani

America is a long way from forty-niners, straw hats and political bunting draped along the rail of an old caboose and cowboys disappearing into the sunset to seek their destiny. It isn't nostalgia that pulls the heart to better days but a specific cognizance that such times and events have turned a corner and rather than just being a "change" it promises to be more of a demise, perhaps a collision.

After forty years of explaining biblical prophecy to people I now find myself more amazed than ever before that the fulfillment of the prophecies is quickly overtaking my ability to proclaim them.

In between all the voices and pictures on the news I heard a newscaster exclaim how he dealt with his children's perception of current events. He told his children to read at least one article from the daily paper each day and discuss it together. His son approached him after reading an article with the question "is the world going to end?"

He answered his son by saying that we can just do more positive things and take heart that we have a great new president and life will go on and just be OK.

I don't need to write a dozen more paragraphs to explain why I think the son had a better grip on the matter than his father but I do need to say that America only needs a reminder not an explanation to see the truth.

If keeping the body lean, the planet green and the truth unseen is what dad meant by being positive then what can we say. The very same dad-newscaster was going to be interviewing America's most popular positive thinking guru Joel Osteen later that day.

Pointing out the terrible things that happen daily around the nation is anything but positive but even Osteen can't stop the flow of the latest stories from all over America. The truth is that no amount of positive hyperbole is sufficient to balance, offset or equalize the raw statistics of the state of the nation. Ignoring these things does not mean the country is OK anymore than hyping them up makes anyone more comfortable, so where is the balance. Let's see.

While commentators are debating every nuance of the stock market and discussing the economy as if all life hung in the balance, in the real America, real life actually is, hanging in the balance.

While everyone from Barack Obama to John Doe is decrying genocide in Darfur, Americans are still killing the unborn at the rate of 4000 per day. In fact more people die at the hands of abortion clinic doctors in one week than in the entire 8 year long Iraq war. Should I mention that the soldiers in Iraq at least had a choice?

We debate teachers pay but don't spend too much time asking why our kids have the highest suicide rate in the world and the lowest academic averages. More than fifty thousand children disappear each year and over 800,000 people are sold into slavery yearly around the world and many of them right here in America. Millions of Americans use dangerous addictive drugs and recreational drugs and have created the largest demand for such substances in the entire world. Why don't they just do positive things instead or go plant a tree?

Turning the eyes away from the horrific in America is not much different than ignoring the smoke bellowing out of the Nazi prison camp cremation ovens. You can put the thought out of the mind but the stench still assaults the nostrils. No amount of positive thinking or celebrating a new president makes us any less culpable.

Gone is the day when people listened to the humble country preacher who compelled them to sink to their knees and in confession turn, repent and receive the Spirit of God into their lives and begin a new life. Now it takes a thousand book writers and mega church pastors or internet websites that still tell the old story of redemption through the cross of Jesus Christ. Only the message is ignored now but soon the messengers will be systematically silenced. That too is prophecy!

Be it prophet or preacher now is the day for treading the fine line between the message of "whosoever will may come" and the warning "don't cast your pearls before the swine." But then again we who follow Him have a different King and Sovereign whose mandates will always take precedence over any law new or old.

Does America really think it can enter a new era where abortion, homosexuality, pornography and general licentiousness will be the norm? Apparently it does. Collective dissimulation does little in Gods eyes to remove culpability. If the whole world believes something is right it can still be dead wrong. In fact that is what prophecy is all about. It is about a day when mankind will totally go reprobate, it is a day just before the day when Christ has to return.

The swagger and full acceptance of bad behavior emboldens the sinner and the delay of retribution strengthens the recalcitrant. The apostle Peter addressed this very condition by saying "Knowing this first that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, and saying, where is the promise of his coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation." (2Pet 3: 3, 4) The gap between the promise and the fulfillment causes people to think anything goes.

America's grace period is about to run out. The call to repentance will still go forth but now it will be heard and acted upon by fewer. Of the few things that God ever revealed to me through scripture or other means one message that was always appendaged to the revelations was "not many will come out."

I have watched as America has replaced the knowledge of God with just about everything they can conger up; evolutionary doctrine, secularism, political correctness, sexual revolutions, Hollywood claptrap, perversions, visions of space travel to the stars just to name a few. What we have as a result of all this is a nation that thinks it can plant a tree, talk to its enemies, do a little positive thing everyday and all will just be fine. This naiveté may look innocuous but it reads more like the end of a nation not a great new change.

My ministry has by its nature always tended to parallel that of the end times prophet Micah but I will borrow from the story of the prophet Jonah so no one thinks I can't see hope. Jonah was told to preach to the city of Nineveh and if they wouldn't hear, God was going to simply destroy it. They did repent and God did not touch it. America could turn as well. Will it? You alone can answer that.

© Michael Bresciani