Hooray, Independence Day is back! Well sort of.
According to our current president, if you are good, really good and obey all commands, wear your mask, take the vaccine, observe social distancing, then you might be so lucky as to have a small barbeque with friends or family for Independence Day this year. However, if you are wanting to come across our southern border legally or illegally, in a sense, every day can be an independence day.
Open Borders, Close Churches
Is it just me, or do you find it strange that we are told we should open our border when we have closed or at least restricted our churches? I find it hard to reconcile these ideas in my mind. On the one hand we hear government leaders, the Vatican, and many in our own Church making the claim that we should open the borders of our country to allow anyone entrance; they claim we should do this without knowing their health, mental, criminal, or family status. And yet these same people advocate for our churches to perform door checks on everyone to determine if they have a temperature. They insist that we check for sniffles, cough, sneezing, or any other symptom we can think of, or demand that they are wearing a mask before we allow them to enter into many of our churches.
At one point in my home state, we weren’t allowed to cross the street to visit our own families because of the danger of Covid, and yet few if any restrictions are being applied for immigrants crossing our borders, legally or illegally.
There are some folks that say if we were truly good Christians, we wouldn’t have borders to keep others from coming in at will. In an odd twist, these very same people have doors and locks upon their homes and apartments, fences around their property to keep others out, and very few of them live anywhere near the border where the chaos is. Some claim borders are not Biblical or Christlike. And yet when I read my Bible, I find that God gave the Israelites borders for the land which He gave to them. They went even further by creating borders for the different tribes of Israel and people were allowed to own property, build a house and plant vineyards. In those days it was a sin to take someone else’s land (1 Kings 21). In the new earth we read that we will build and plant and another shall not live or eat therein (Isaiah 65:22). Sounds like there will be some semblance of borders even in the new earth.
The crisis we now face at our border begs the question why the world is so intent on America opening its borders while not much, if anything, is said about other countries opening their borders?
I don’t know about you, but I haven’t heard government leaders or the Pope asking that China, Canada, or Russia open their borders to allow any and all refugees in. It makes one think perhaps there is a conspiracy against America to undermine our way of life, our government structure, our economic structure etc. Maybe one answer would be that the papacy and world organizations such as the United Nations prefer socialist or even communist governance above what we have thus far enjoyed in this country which is a democratically controlled republic.
We are told that we need to reinvent capitalism since it is the root of all racial, social, and moral problems facing our world today. I believe “The Great Reset” on the horizon calls for, with the blessing of Rome, “inclusive capitalism”.
What that really is I am not quite sure, but my bet would be that it means we—the working class people— will have less and less while our governments and the elites will have more and more. Not only of what we have in monetary means, but more and more control over our individual freedoms as well.
They would have us believe these changes are necessary for the “common good” as defined by the Pope’s encyclicals, “Laudato Si” and “Fratelli Tutti”. Apparently these two encyclicals contain the plans to usher in a new utopian world where we all live equally poor, helpless, and dependent upon the “woke” caring and loving leadership to ensure equity for us all.
I have seen a Great Reset video telling me that in the future I will own nothing, and yet I will be happy. Happy, as I allow someone else to own everything and mete out my portion as they see fit, for a price of course. Frankly, they don’t know me very well! I’ll put my trust in Jesus and His plan thank you very much!
One has to wonder why so many people want to come to this country since this country is being portrayed as, hateful, racist, homophobic, Islamophobic—and the list goes on and on. If opening our borders to everyone that wants to come in is the answer for the woes of other nations, then there must be something right and good about this country.
God blessed this country and we have enjoyed prosperity because of His blessings. This is not to say that wrongs haven’t been committed and mistakes made in the founding and running of this country, but we should realize that this country is the greatest country in the history of the world. Proven by, if nothing else, the vast number of people who want to be here. The world should apply the principles that made America great to all the nations so they could all prosper as we have. This would alleviate the need of mass immigration to our country by raising the standard of living and the treatment people receive in all countries.
America is/was Unique
We need to understand that the founding of this nation, beginning with the Declaration of Independence and leading to a government with a Bill of Rights and a Constitution which promises individual freedoms that outweigh the “common good” was brilliant.
That separation between church and state, freedom of conscience, and individual freedoms are paramount.
That government should protect the people from tyranny—not rule over the people with restrictive laws.
We should embrace our founding principles again. Have we always lived up to those founding principles? The answer is no, but that doesn’t make the principles faulty, it shows fallen humans are faulty. Our failures to live up to God’s standards do not make His standards bad, any more than our failures to live up to the standards set forth by this country do not make those standards bad. As a nation we need to go back to those standards and principles, not abandon them.
The Declaration of Independence states that all men are created equal but that hasn’t always been the way we’ve treated each other. Yet the fact this Biblical principle was included in the writing shows that lamb-like qualities were present in the founding of this nation. And yet Satan would have us believe our nation, especially its foundational principles, are a big problem and not part of the solution. There is a working agenda to convince people that this country started out bad and was founded on wrong principles that must be reversed if we are ever going to have peace and prosperity for all.
Attacks From Within
If you believe the media, government leaders, Rome, our educational systems, BLM, Antifa, the world organizations of today, and various wokeventists, America has been bad (dragon-like) from its beginning and we need to change and become more Christlike. This is a direct reversal of what our Bibles say about this country. The Bible tells us that the 2nd beast (America) of Revelation 13 rises as a lamblike, Christlike, nation, but that it eventually becomes dragon-like. This means the principles this country was founded upon are good and yet this is opposite of what we are being told today. With the new agenda on the horizon for this country I believe we will soon be, and in some cases already are, speaking as a dragon.
The bottom line is this. When we are told, in direct opposition to our Bibles, that our country started out bad (think project 1619) and we need to make it good with new principles (think Critical Race Theory, the Great Reset, inclusive capitalism, Laudato Si, Fratelli Tutti etc.) we should recognize these proposed new principles as coming from the dragon and not Christ.
The greatest deceptions in the history of the world are unfolding before our very eyes and too many people, even some in our church, are falling for them. The great controversy between Christ and Satan is playing out on this planet and it is reaching its ultimate climax in the soon coming of Jesus, who will eventually restore all things as they were originally intended. We have our Bibles to teach us to avoid these deceptions and we need to turn its pages, studying to be wise as serpents while remaining gentle as doves (Matthew 10:16). Wise as serpents means we should understand our enemy, while gentle as doves means we should remain Christlike in our dealings and associations with others, including our enemies.
It is the fulfillment of Bible prophecy as we watch great efforts being made to change America from its foundational principles and ways in order to make her a better nation for the “common good” of all. The Babylon of Revelation is working to portray us as the evil that must be overcome with her ideas and we cannot fall for the lies.
“Come out of her my people” is the call from heaven. It is time we listen and obey the call to come out of Babylon completely, call others to come out completely, and stand for Jesus. As my pastor said in his latest sermon, we as a church have a mission to prepare a people for translation. It is time to work and not be idle with closed or restricted churches.
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Tim has been a member of the 7th Day Adventist Church since 2006. He lives in Ludington, MI with his wife Barb.