Wicked Leaders and Wicked People

Adolf Hitler--"What good fortune for governments that the people do not think."

If stupidity is the first cousin of ignorance, then surely the stupid offspring of ignorance has become Vladimir Lenin's "Useful Idiots" who gratefully lockstep to the drummers of propaganda like mindless puppets that are controlled by their masters from above. It was Lenin who realized early on that if you could keep the unwashed masses fat, dumb and contented, you could steal their souls and control their minds.

That's fat, dumb and contented as in generous government welfare handouts; free health care, food-stamps, school tuition and other assorted goodies doled out to an ever grateful, intellectually bankrupt society that will gladly sell its collective soul for an ever increasing entitlement nirvana. 

As recently as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the western worldview was still based upon faith in God, educational achievement, hard work, sacrifice and perseverance that usually paid dividends in the form of long life, good jobs, successful careers and strong families.

Unfortunately, that was then and this is now. This is now manifests in the form of 40 percent of Detroit's residents who are deemed functionally illiterate, despite the gargantuan amount of coin that both the Federal Government and the state of Michigan pour into Detroit's hellhole of a school system. 

This is now manifests in the form of declining marriage across the United States where, according to the Brookings Institution, only 48 percent of the population lived in matrimony in 2010. In the prehistoric days of 1950, Brookings reported that 78 percent of American households lived in matrimony and 43 percent of those households had children living in them. 

And this is now manifests in the form of the rotten moral fruit that began with the 1960's counterculture movement and sexual revolution that glorified promiscuity, infidelity and perversion as normal behavior and established legalized abortion as the solution to eradicate the consequences of all that unbridled pleasure.

Certainly, Christendom has played no small role in the decline of western civilization. In the mid-nineteenth century, the church ignored Christ for Robespierre, Locke, Spinoza and Bayle, and subsequently emptied the cross of its power. 

It was the apostle Paul who famously wrote: "For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength." (1 Corinthians 1:25) And yet Christendom forgot that 150 years ago and decided to cast its lot with human wisdom and human strength. As a result, Charles Darwin's lies were embraced as scientific truth; Christ was reduced to an ancient Gandhi and God was dismissed as the fabrication of primitive, uneducated minds.

Ironically, the United States and much of Western Europe still see themselves as Christian entities, but that's based more on cultural perception than true faith in Jesus Christ as the Son of God and the second person of the Trinity. Proof is established upon the factual evidence rather than in cultural bromides; the churches in Western Europe are practically empty on most Sundays and in America, they've shed 20 million members since 1958 and have seen over 8,000 fellowships close their doors. 

That's a spiritual recipe for moral suicide and if you have your doubts about that you can ponder this; in 1962 when the U.S. was still largely influenced by Judeo-Christian ethics and values, America's educational system ranked first in the world in scholastic achievement test scores. However, by 2009, according to the Program for International School Assessment (PISA) the U.S. ranked fourteenth in reading, seventeenth in science and twenty-fifth in math. 

And so, a civilization that spurns its past and lives only for the temporal pleasures of the present moment has no future. When a society finds animal life so sacrosanct that it can propose building a shrine for a herd of cows killed in a truck accident and yet callously ignores a stricken man who lays critically ill on the floor of a department store, then the sun has set on western civilization. 

The mega-preachers and big time rock star evangelists with their bulging waste-lines and $6,000 Armani threads can protest that this isn't their fault and to a large extent they're right. But they're not providing the right solutions either when the right solution is the Prince of Peace Jesus Christ who's not being invited to live in many human hearts these days. 

Certainly not when animal life trumps human life that gets trampled underfoot by those who must have the latest Air Jordans adorning their callous feet. 

Those callous feet belong to wicked people who use their callous feet to travel to voting booths to elect wicked leaders after their own wicked hearts. When ancient Israel and Judah turned away from God to wickedness, the Jewish nation got the government and leaders it deserved; wicked kings such as Jehoahaz (810 B.C.) who encouraged the worship of pagan gods in Israel; Amaziah, the King of Judah (790 B.C.) who allowed paganism and idolatry to flourish in Judah throughout his reign and Jeroboam II, the King of Israel (770 B.C.) who also allowed paganism and idolatry to flourish in Israel during his reign. 

The prophet Isaiah, who lived during the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah, recorded these angry words from the Lord who expressed his wrath at the wicked rulers of both Israel and Judah and their wicked followers who supported them: "Your rulers are rebels, companions of thieves; they all love bribes and chase after their gifts. They do not defend the cause of the fatherless; the widow's case does not come before them." (Isaiah 1:23)

And then, in a stern rebuke the Lord issued to the leaders of ancient Israel that could easily be applied to the United States and the nations of Western Europe, the Lord told Isaiah this: "You have abandoned your people, the house of Jacob. They (Israel and Judah) are full of superstitions from the East; they practice divination like the Philistines and clasp hands with pagans. Their land is full of horses; there is no end to their chariots. Their land is full of idols; they bow down to the work of their hands, to what their fingers have made." (Isaiah 2:6-9) 

Consider the parallels between ancient Israel and the modern western world; ancient Israel flourished materially and yet turned away from God to worship pagan idols. The western world flourishes materially and yet ignores God who provided the material blessings. Instead, much of the west either denies that God exists or worships a false Christ who encourages the worship of materialism and allegedly reveals the secrets of acquiring vast wealth.

The moral tragedy that results from a society or civilization that forgets God cannot be overstated. The Germany that produced a Catholic Monk named Martin Luther who exposed the spiritual corruption of the Roman Catholic Church in 1517 when he launched what became known as the Protestant Reformation was the same Germany that produced a despicable atheist named Friedrich Nietzsche who provided the major immoral influence for an infamous mass murderer named Adolf Hitler. 

And certainly, while every society produces both good and bad human beings, both Nietzsche and Hitler were the products of Germany's post-Christian, post-modern culture that had relegated Christ to an ancient historical figure and replaced God with human reason.

And one of the typical characteristics of a post-Christian society is its sordid deference to its religious past as some sort of liturgical antiquity of an outdated era. The Germany of the 1930's that elected Adolf Hitler as its Chancellor was a nation full of churches full of so-called Christians that claimed to worship the Son of God Jesus Christ whose own people were being slaughtered by the millions in death camps that were located just miles from some of those churches. 

And if that pathetic irony seems unique only to the anti-Semitic Europe of the early twentieth century, then consider all these churches in America's big cities that provide absolutely no moral influence on the surrounding real estate. Outside of the Hallelujah Risen Savior storefront church you can find the assorted human tragedies drowning in Jim Beam; flying high on heroin and crack and dying in a hail of bullets from a gangbanger's 9mm Glock.

In the old days, the churches had an excuse for ignoring those drunks, addicts and other assorted losers because they kept their distance from the churches. These days, however, its virtually impossible to tell the difference from what's hanging around outside the churches from what's inside of them. The clergy may arrive in the modern chariots powered by several hundred horses, but the clergy's no different than the rabble inhabiting the asphalt outside if the clergy chooses to airbrush that rabble out of their myopic eyesight. 

Those chariots powered by BMW, Infinity, Lexus, Porsche etc. may allow the high-flying preachers and ministers to escape the moment that provides the unpleasant visual reality that adorns the sidewalks around places like Hallelujah Hall, but they can't airbrush away the human tragedies from human consciences.

Even worse, the dereliction of the biblical gospel inside these churches often produces the moral tragedies that manifest outside of them. For nearly 20 years, Barack Obama sat in the pews of Chicago's Trinity United Church, headed by an arch-racist preacher named Jeremiah Wright who was a Malcolm X in vestments. Wright helped Obama shape his contempt for the United States, 

Conservatives, Israel and Evangelical Christians with his inflammatory rhetoric. And while Obama claimed to disown the fire-breathing preacher during the 2008 presidential campaign after a series of embarrassing videos surfaced that displayed Wright's hate-filled speeches, Obama certainly didn't disown the preacher's philosophy. During a revealing speech that he gave in 2008 to an audience of intellectual elites in San Francisco, Obama maligned conservative Christians as uneducated morons who choose guns and religion over academic achievement.

And yet, just who were the uneducated buffoons in 2008? Those who saw through and exposed Obama's con as the political creature of Chicago's gangster-controlled Democratic Machine and consort of crooks such as Tony Rezko and terrorists such as Bill Ayers? 

Or those 69 million Americans who ignored the evidence that Obama was a con artist and a hardcore Marxist who masqueraded in Christian garb? If wicked people do indeed elect wicked leaders after their own hearts, then the United States circa 2008 indeed got the government and leader it deserved.  

And if America got what it deserved in Obama, then what of all the other nations throughout history that got sordid leaders and brutal dictators? Did Russia deserve Stalin? Did Cuba deserve Castro? Did Germany deserve Hitler? And do the nations of the Middle East such as Syria and Iran deserve the wicked tyrants that crush their people? 

The answer is yes because ultimately, when a nation ignores and rejects the true God of the universe who sent his Son Jesus Christ into the world to die for the sins of mankind, then a nation opens its doors to tyranny and evil. Russia may have had its Orthodox Church, but that church was the historical progeny of the corrupt Roman Catholic Church. 

That means that in the lexicon of the Russian Orthodox Church, Christ was unreachable and unknowable to the common people; who could only be contacted by an illegitimate priesthood through hackneyed rituals and liturgical alchemy. In the lexicon of true biblical Christianity, Christ is easily reachable by faith through prayer and can be approached by anyone rather than by a pompous, self-important and unelected clergy.

Wicked leaders have terrorized peoples and nations since the dawn of history. But their reign of terror can be terminated by the people if they repent of their wickedness and return to God. 

After King Solomon had finished construction of the Jewish Temple dedicated to the God of Israel, the Lord spoke these revealing words to Israel's king: "When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command locusts to devour the land or send a plague among my people, if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land." (2 Chronicles 7:13-14)

There are those who would ask; what wickedness is the United States and the many nations of the world guilty of? Consider this wickedness; when nations slaughter millions of unborn children in the womb in the name of "freedom and choice", then do those nations not deserve to be judged? Man has been created in the image of God (Genesis 1:26) and when he murders, he has committed the ultimate blasphemy against God himself. Evil is never about freedom and choice; it's about sweeping wickedness underneath a proverbial rug and attempting to rationalize it away to appease guilty consciences. 

In a perverted sense, abortion is indeed about freedom and choice; the freedom God has given man to reject his transcendent moral laws and the choice to break those laws. But rebellion has its consequences in the many types of judgment God pours out on this world that manifests in personal illness, misfortune, hopelessness, failure and depression to corporate forms such as famines, plagues, earthquakes, droughts, severe weather and the rise of evil rulers and despots.

Wickedness isn't limited to abortion; it has manifested in the glorification of sexual perversion, murder, narcotics, street gangs, violence, immorality, rampant divorce, greed, idolatry, witchcraft and godless secularism. The souls and minds of young children are being hijacked and perverted by wicked people who masquerade as "educators" and scientists. 

Young children at the kindergarten level are now being indoctrinated into homosexuality by wicked people who have appeased their consciences by convincing themselves that God is a myth. 

But consider this; if God turns out to be real, then according to Christ, this will be the destiny of those who corrupt the minds and souls of young children: "But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea." (Matthew 18:6) Christ's caveat is ominous; those who corrupt young children and fail to repent will spend eternity burning in the fires of hell. And no amount of denial or self-delusion will conjure that fate away.

Will the world repent and return to God? Tragically, biblical prophecy reveals that the world will continue along the path of evil and will eventually get the ultimate evil leader it deserves in the Antichrist. This leader will reveal himself to the world as Jesus Christ who has returned to save the planet from certain destruction. Unfortunately, this "savior" will be Satan's counterfeit who will possess supernatural powers to deceive the world into embracing him. 

What's truly tragic about his coming appearance is the fact that Christ himself not only warned that the Antichrist would appear, but he even described the events surrounding this impostor's appearance to give Christians a heads up on this massive deception. Christ stated: "At that time if anyone says to you, 'look, here is the Christ!' or, 'There he is!' do not believe it. For false Christs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and miracles to deceive even the elect--if that were possible. See, I have told you ahead of time." (Matthew 24:23-25)

The appearance of the Antichrist will culminate with a massive spiritual deception that will ironically be encouraged by those who believe themselves to be Christians. The burgeoning end-time global Christian revival movement is not only based upon faulty biblical exegesis, but also upon willful ignorance of the prophetic caveats of Christ, Paul and Peter who warned of a massive fraudulent spiritual movement that would arise in the church in the last days and eventually spread throughout the entire world. Those who willfully ignore God's word in the bible to follow alleged "new revelations" from heaven are setting themselves and the world up for a disaster.

And sadly, the coming disaster will be earned and deserved. A wicked world that has forsaken the true Jesus Christ who came into the world 2,000 years ago to reconcile mankind back to God for an impostor who will dazzle many with demonic power, is a world that will pay the ultimate price with the worst kind of suffering, bloodshed and destruction the world will ever experience in the coming Great Tribulation. 

And that suffering, bloodshed and destruction will be the handiwork of the false, wicked Christ that wicked people have embraced after their own wicked hearts.