United States | Ain't Complicated

An Anabaptist Prophet Looks at the Iowa Caucuses

What's with making the results tonight so significant?

Before speaking to that question, I’ll tell you a bit more about this post by promising to answer three other questions as well:

Who sounds most genuinely friendly to the Christian faith: Clinton, Cruz, Rubio, Sanders, or Trump?
Who are the Christian candidates in the race?
What should be my role in the process?

Yesterday I thought again of the bizarre nature of national Presidential politics in the United States. The towering gullibility of the collective American mind is demonstrably bizarre.

Consider the two-ring caucus presently launching the opening act of Let’s Elect a President 2016.

The hawk-eyed Iowans will gather tonight to chatter and vote their hearts or minds in an effort to select a party standard bearer in each major political party. What comes out of Iowa tonight is supposed to be Really Significant.

Look. I don’t want to be unkind or sarcastic, but I have to be blunt. Iowa is only one of fifty states. What’s with making the results tonight so significant? Weird. Read it all

Do You See Israel’s Expanding Peril?

While the world is used to the planes being airborne anyway...

Mark's CIA map of the Middle East

RISE OF ARAB ARMY

I saw that headline on the Drudge Report early this morning. He linked it to an LA Times story that includes this quote:

Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah Sisi endorsed the creation of a joint military force to defend Arab nations.

Sisi said the Arab world was at a critical crossroads and facing unprecedented difficulties.

If Israel’s Arab neighbors get a “good thing going” with their joint military efforts in Yemen…

And if Israel’s Arab neighbors see the American Administration’s growing hostility toward Israel…

And if Israel’s Arab neighbors perceive American weakness in relation to Iran…

And if Israel’s neighbors imagine a shift in America’s long-standing commitment to Israel, her secrets, and her security…

And if Israel’s neighbors take literally the American threat to abandon Israel at the United Nations… Read it all

Mr. Levin, It’s No Use

Mark Roth tells Mark Levin his defense and promotion of the US Constitution is a waste of time. Hope for a Constitutional rescue is pointless. America is lost.

I’ve listened to some of your informed, eloquent, impassioned monologues defending and promoting the US Constitution. Though I think they are helpfully enlightening, I’m convinced you’re wasting your time.

For your laudable mission to succeed, the Constitution must be carefully observed and honored. And protected, defended, and enforced, for it can do none of those for itself.

Alas, far too many judicial and political leaders entrusted with such a task have been (and are) derelict in that. Furthermore, far too much of the populace just doesn’t care. And both of those numbers are on the rise, not the wane.

The judicial, political, Constitutional war to preserve this republic as founded is lost. Nothing can be done to rescue the United States of America. Nothing. Do the political and cultural math — the numbers just aren’t there. Read it all

Yes, It Could Happen Here

God has so blessed America that we can happily relegate such terror to Asia and Europe and say it can’t happen here—but it could if churches content themselves with blessing bicycles, bees, and yaks instead of teaching about sin and what happens to societies that encourage it rather than restrain it. We need to learn about real ghouls.

Halloween’s real ghouls

For Lack of Five?

How spiritually and morally bankrupt is the United States of America? (Substitute your country if you prefer.)

This nation founded on many Christian principles is so deep in moral and spiritual debt that she can never dig out on her own. (Of course, that’s the case with every nation and every soul in every nation.)

But it doesn’t seem that the USA has reached yet the depravity of Sodom: Read it all

Imperfect Good Samaritan

Of course all these cases were more complex than a brief mention can convey. And of course US foreign policy, under presidents from Nixon to Obama, has accomplished enormous good in the world — including, at times, the saving of many lives.

Yet the good America has done is dwarfed by the good America could have done. Too often we have been willing to disregard unspeakable evil in the mistaken belief that preventing atrocities is not “an American concern.” Kissinger’s words to Nixon that day in 1973 were repellent. The mindset behind them has been all too common.

Those are the closing two paragraphs of Yes, genocide is ‘an American concern’ by Jeff Jacoby.

I’m wondering, though, what lessons the article has for me as a Christian — lessons in responding to the needs of those who are outside my various circles and thus don’t touch or affect me directly.

Survival: USA, President Obama, Israel

Can they all survive these perilous times?

I got to pondering that question on Tuesday of this week (ie April 6, 2010).

My conclusions?

I do not see how President Obama can survive to complete his first term in office.
Nor do I see how the United States can survive almost three more years of what it has experienced in the first year plus of the Obama Presidency.
About Israel, well, take man’s measuring rod and she’s doomed also.

I should remind you at this point that I am a two-separate-kingdoms Christian. I am apolitical and my comments are likewise.

I believe we are in a period of intense peril for the USA, for President Obama, and for Israel. I believe this great peril exceeds anything any of those three have experienced before (at least if we limit the scope of that comment to the modern nation-state of Israel and not historical Israel).

The course presently charted for the US will hasten its collapse or at least the collapse of her system of government (which would be catastrophic enough). I will not elaborate on why I think that.

President Obama surely has more than the usual potential assassins plotting his destruction. Again, I’ll not take the time to elaborate. I don’t see how the Secret Service can keep him safe.

Israel need only look at the radical change this week in the American nuclear posture to doubt her own survivability. The US has just declared it has taken a nuclear counterstrike off the table as a response to a non-nuclear WMD attack. If the US will not retaliate that way to such an attack on itself, why should Israel think the US will stick its neck out for her when she’s attacked with chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons? Couple that with other developments of late, and Israel appears dangerously alone.

Well, I have taxes to do. And a Sunday School class to prepare to teach in the morning. And missionary reports from Mexico to get ready for tomorrow afternoon’s Mission Board meeting. And other pressing matters pressing me. I already spent too much time on this. I shall have to forego the pleasure of expanding my points.

In closing, these points:

As I understand the Scriptures, Israel survives, thanks only to dramatic divine intervention.
About the United States and about President Obama, I don’t know. I’m not that kind of prophet.
I just don’t see how they survive another three years.
I pray they do.

I call on God’s faithful people to pray that way as well.

PS: Am I going off the deep end?

PS, Jr: I’m not fearful nor paranoid. Nor am I a kook. 😉