ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. (CBS/AP) — Atlantic City’s newest casino is shutting its doors just over two years after opening amid high hopes of turning around the crumbling seaside resort’s gambling market.

You know when Casino’s start closing down, it’s a bad economic sign!

You know when there are riots in America’s streets (St. Louis is just the beginning), Americans being imprisoned in other nations without a word of protest from American leadership, and terrorist group Hamas being praised and defended despite repeated acts of war, terrorism, breaking of cease-fire agreements, all while Israel is being vilified by so-called evangelicals, and our president just goes on his third vacation in a month, that this nation, is in a fine mess.

When the headlines themselves start to become re-runs; “Malaysian airlines plane disappears”, other planes “vanish from radar for some twenty minutes”, “Malaysian airline crashes”  you can’t help but know that things are not what they seem.  Have you ever read or heard firsthand, missionary accounts of being led through enemy territories in impossible situations with no cover to hide behind, and yet miraculously were not seen by the tribesmen, or soldiers, or whatever enemy, and the only explanation is supernatural intervention?  If God can order His angels to hide His missionary, if sorcerers could (by Satan) mimic the miracles of Moses, then maybe Satan can enable the “cloaking” of an airplane.  Or give an Air Force engineer the means to invent a cloaking device.  It was just December of last year that China and America were “in a race to cloaking technology”.  Knowing that modern folk’s attention spans are very limited, I guess they figured six months was long enough for everyone to have forgotten all about that! I mean, think about it.  We already have the ability to put pixels into suspension that can be injected under the skin for an animated tattoo.   They were working on pixilated paint a couple years back.  Technology is already existing for fooling radar, but with pixilated paint, a plane merely has to record the sky around it, and display that (via pixels) on it’s outer skin, to make the plane invisible to the eye (and to cameras).

Satan is not very creative.

He can only borrow from someone else’s ideas.  Pastor Hoggard mentioned in one of his live broadcasts that he wouldn’t be surprised in light of the Malaysian airline disappearance, if there were to be a “false rapture” type event in this world.  You think the powers-that-be (with the help of Satan’s powers) couldn’t pull that off?  I think it is not at all outside the scope of possibility.  I think I have even heard Hoggard speculate on a possible false antichrist.  Talk about confusion.  So much is happening so fast these days, that even with lots of “watchmen” Christians reporting things online, it is kind of hard to keep up!

All those people who grew up in churches barely hearing anything at all of correct scripture prophecy, or no prophecy, can’t help but be fooled by an orchestrated false-rapture event.  There is not a whole lot that is done “in secret” anymore, it’s just that fewer and fewer people care to know.  They prefer their blissful ignorance.  And so when the actual antichrist appears they will think he is Christ.  Think of the god that is being sold to them as it is.  A god who won’t judge, a god who won’t punish anyone, and this guy comes promising to feed and clothe and provide for all of them, and all they need to do is have their own individual identifier.  All because they have been  painted an inaccurate picture of Christ, and of salvation, and of Christianity, they will believe.

I hear a lot of people get bent out of shape about Hoggard because he doesn’t like to speak in man-coined phrases and terms such as “rapture” and “dispensationalism”.  I think that is actually a very wise policy, because particularly in this internet age, the definitions of those non-scripture terms have been “re-imagined”.  When the meanings of words are no longer fixed, then we can never get our message across.  That God has “dispensed” grace and His Truths, in all of the various ages, is clearly scriptural, but when someone defines that as men in the Old Testament being saved by obeying the law, and performing sacrifices, verses the present day man being saved by the grace alone, that sets up the definition of dispensationalism to be misconstrued.  Salvation was and always is all by grace, always through faith, and accomplished only by the death of Christ.  In the O.T. the sacrificial system merely pre-figured or pointed to the promised redemption to come.  By faith it was accounted unto them as righteousness.  It says that about the Old Testament saints,  in the New Testament passage of Hebrews 11.  God doesn’t change.

There is much in this present moment in history that is very confusing for people who are looking for the truth. (And not everyone is, believe me, there are many who want to hear only what they want to hear).  That fact itself is an indication of the nearness of the return of Christ.

Faith is not “knowing”.  It is trusting.  Taking God at His Word.  But people aren’t getting God’s Word.  There has been a famine of the preaching of the Word for a long time in America.  A good six decades at least.  Well, there are different kinds of “famine”.  Look at the statistics in America.  How many people live “below the poverty line”, and the statistics prove that the “poor” in America are the most obese “poor” in the history of the world.  Why is that?  Because they can buy more junk food with their free food stamps than they can healthy food!  So there is an epidemic of obesity in the midst of a “famine” of real nutritional food.  It’s not just boxes of Ho-Ho’s and Twinkies that are the problem, of course, there are all the genetically modified foods, the hybridization of crops, the dwindling number of farmers, the preservatives needed to keep food fresh enough to travel across the nation, and sit on Grocery Store shelves a few days and in home pantries for months, the few unadulterated seeds kept in a vault in the arctic someplace!

There is no shortage of “houses of worship” in this nation today, but there is very much a famine of the Word.  Even if one goes into a conservative fundamental church there is a good possibility they are getting counterfeits there too, if not in the preaching, then possibly in the music, if not in the music, then in some literature that wasn’t vetted.  Not only that, but many professing Christians are “hearing private messages” from (they think) god, but it’s not GOD.  Satan appears as an angel of light.  So do his messengers.  People who sit and “meditate” trying to “hear” from God (instead of letting the Bible suffice) are going to hear something.  They will be very convinced it is God talking to them, but they are hearing lies, wrapped up stealthily within partial truths.  They are going to spread those messages, with full assurance that it was “from God’s lips to their own ear”, and people are going to “feel” blessed by their messages, but none of those experiences are an indicator of truth.

A year ago my own pastor didn’t seem ready to believe that America was past a point of no return.  I did.  I have been convinced for longer than that, although only God Himself knows when that line was actually crossed.  I haven’t been able to get my own pastor to follow this blog.  Which, isn’t necessarily a bad reflection on him, he just has enough already to keep very busy with what the Lord has called him to do.  I do know that he now seems more convinced of how late the hour is.  There are times when I sit down to post and wonder what more there really is to say.  I have felt we were, at least here in America, already at Revelation 22:11 for some time now.  Not chronologically speaking, as to the actual moment in the future this world will arrive at that point when God makes that declaration, (let he who is unjust be unjust still, let he who is righteous, be righteous still), but spiritually, yes, it would almost seem that there is no one interested in knowing how to be saved anymore, nor who thinks they even need to be. I do believe, as Hoggard said, America is the modern Sodom, leading the way for the acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle as normal for the rest of the world, but not only that, it is America that is leading the world in devaluing human life itself, what it means to be human.  I do think the U.S. is the modern embodiment of Babylon-the-Great, spiritually speaking.  The nation that was once that “shining city” a beacon of light and hope, who carried the gospel to the world, now we are the top exporters of one thing most of all, (and very little else) and that is pornography.  Our own government is complicit in pedophilia, and human trafficking, drug-smuggling, and it is no secret the United States government has armed a majority of the terrorists over the years.  Now Obama has flung wide the gates of our homeland for any and all to come in and pilfer and loot and rape and pillage.  Do you know, that sounds familiar!  I do believe that happened a few times in the scriptures.  Always to God’s people, and as a result of pride, rebellion, and disobedience.  God does not change.  His principles apply to all nations.  If God cannot be known by the Word He gave us, then there is nothing in this life that can be known.  It is that simple!

I pray today for all of the women and men who are in positions where they are possibly the lone salt and light, in a job, in a government body, in a school, in a family.  May we continue to occupy until the very last second, but Lord, we pray, come quickly, even so!