The Christian Digest [#2]
Presents
The Coming Persecution
From "How to Prepare for the Coming Persecution,"
by Larry W. Poland, Ph.D.

The contents of this issue of The Christian Digest deal with a topic of interest to all Christians: The Endtime. The following book summary deals with the signs of that time.--A time which is now upon us. Take heed to its warnings, for as Jesus said, "When ye shall see all these things, know that it is near, even at the doors. This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled." (Matthew 24:33,34)


THE FEARSTORM: Afraid I'm More Afraid
         One night, as I reflected on the nearly half-century of my life, I wondered, "Why is this strange emotion of fear such an increasingly common experience?" I have never been thought of as a fearful person; fearless is a more common description.
         Am I fearful because I am now part of an urban megalopolis, this kid from small-town, middle America? Is it because innocent adults have been murdered, little kids have been kidnapped and molested, and women have been raped in the community in which I live?
         It certainly isn't because of weak faith in divine care--the kind of faith that drives out a "spirit of fear." Nor do I think my increasingly frequent fear feelings are the result of irrational and free-floating anxieties which bespeak some emotional instability.
         I have another, call it "mystical," hypothesis. In the same way that dogs have been reported to have premonitions of their masters' deaths, and barnyard animals have been known to become restless before an earthquake, I believe the human race is getting an intuitive prewarning of impending doom. I believe thinking people all over the planet are sensing, at the instinctive level, the storm building. They can smell the ozone in the air and sense the barometric pressure falling for the coming cataclysm.
         But the real storm is being preceded by a hurricane of anxiety, a tornado of apprehension, a hailstorm of fright--a fearstorm.


The Facts Beyond the Fears
         The rash of defaults by Third World nations on loans to creditor nations, the collapse of the American savings and loans, the near collapse of oil-based economies from the Middle East to Mexico to Houston, and the cosmic proportion of America's national debt are pushing up anxieties like fever pushes up a thermometer.
         You and I aren't inoculated against this one, for these financial statistics are closely related to the trouble we may have making ends meet. If you give birth to a bouncing baby this year, the child will enter the World more than $60,000 in hock the first day of his life--his share of the U.S. national debt. That debt is now past $3,000,000,000,000--three trillion dollars--and the government has to borrow more than half a billion dollars every single day just to pay the interest on the monster. That means that someone is cutting little pieces out of all your dollar bills every minute that passes.
         In addition to what Uncle Sam is trimming off our personal assets, we aren't doing badly at sending ourselves to the poorhouse. Consumer debt almost tripled during the decade 1977 to 1987, and 2.5 million American farmers borrowed more money than debt-plagued Mexico, Brazil and Argentina combined. The average American carries such a heavy debt-load and has so little savings that he is threatened with economic disaster if he loses his income for six weeks. (--As has now happened to millions of people in the U.S.!)
         We are also losing possessions at an unprecedented rate to people who apparently want them more than we do. In 1988, theft in the U.S. amounted to a loss of $343 million, and the probability of someone breaking into our houses to steal some of our earthly goods is one out of four this year. If this is your year to get hit, you can count on more trauma than just the loss of goods. An FBI report notes:
         The impact of this violent crime on its victims cannot be measured in terms of monetary loss alone. While the object of a robbery is to obtain money or property, the crime always involves force or the threat of force, and many victims suffer serious personal injury.


From Contamination to Child Care
         Then there is the AIDS fear. Hostesses serve paper plates to known homosexuals for fear of having the lethal virus reach their kitchens. Parents pull their children out of school because of a single student who got AIDS from a blood transfusion. Fearful and angry that Louise and Clifford Ray planned to send their three AIDS-infected children to school, residents of Arcadia, Florida, burned the Rays' home to the ground.
         Family members line up to give blood for ailing relatives and friends to avoid the risk of having a loved one get the disease that is regarded as both 100 percent incurable and 100 percent fatal. That is called fear--F-E-A-R.
         Then there are our precious kids. Think back, if you are a parent, to the relative freedom from fear your parents exhibited in raising you. Now compare it to the precautions you and other parents exercise today. Would you, for a minute, allow your child the freedom to roam the streets and neighborhoods of your town like your parents permitted you to do? I doubt it.
         The shift in modern morals means there are hundreds of thousands of morally sick people across this land seeking to prey on our children. There are hundreds of child pornography magazines being distributed across the nation and read by people who fantasize about sexual acts with little boys and girls like ours.
         Despite what the gay rights people would like to have you believe about the acceptability of their lifestyle, the homosexual way of life commonly involves "cruising" or some other form of search for young, fresh sexual partners. During the course of one research study on AIDS, it was discovered the average homosexual interviewed had had 550 sexual partners. The AIDS victims averaged 1,100 different sexual partners with some reporting as many as 20,000! This means that every day sexually addicted homosexuals in communities across America are out looking for attractive young men and boys whom they can introduce to the world of sodomy.


The Day the Gangs Took Over Our Country
         Consider the drug/gang crisis. As you read this, more than a dozen drug/gang networks are spreading out of the highly policed, urban areas of the U.S. and opening up "new territories" for drug traffic in small, rural towns across America. Out-manned, out-gunned and intimidated, police and sheriff's departments in hundreds of medium-sized and small cities now realise they have lost control of their own communities to a ruthless, well-financed, heavily-armed, international band of terrorists.
         You know we are in trouble when the federal government seriously considers using the military or the National Guard to help fight the drug/gang war. You know things are out of control when the Los Angeles police department repeatedly puts one thousand additional officers on the streets on random sweeps in an effort to stop the drug dealing, gang slaughter and drive-by shootings--only to have the effort fail.


And When You Put It All Together...
         The international spread of pornographic films, videos, tele-porn, computer porn and hard-core literature is feeding the insatiable global lust for perverse and uncontrolled sexual pursuits. In America today there are more adult bookstores than there are McDonald's restaurants, and the global porn trade is estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
         The satellite-computer linkup of the World's banking, investing and financial structures creates an unprecedented potential for total, global depression triggered in an instant. By one scenario, this could be triggered by a catastrophic earthquake in Tokyo, now the financial capital of planet Earth. When Tokyo itches, Wall Street scratches. If Tokyo gets cardiac arrest, what will keep Wall Street from dying?
         Beyond all this, there looms a spectre even more insidious than anything I've yet described. We've seen it in the past, and we're going to see it again. In many circles, it's already begun.
         It's persecution.--The deliberate, calculated terrorizing of a group of people because of their religious beliefs, political viewpoints or national/ethnic heritage.
         Lest we take comfort in the protection of the great American system of free press, let me remind you that never in the history of a civilization has a single cadre of individuals who do not share the dominant values of their society wielded so much power to shape and alter the thinking of the masses. With the average American home glued to the tube seven-and-a-half to nine hours every single day, the media elite are more powerful in creating and twisting public opinion than the government! So great is this power that elected officials themselves live in more fear of the media's cameras and microphones than they do an assassin's bullet. Murder by media is far more commonplace.
         Before you are through with this article, we will have documented for you the turning of the media and intellectuals against values you hold dear. You will see the fangs of the secular press reaching out to claw to pieces any rivals to its hedonistic, relativistic, Man-centered World view.
         You see, I am out to convince you that none of this is happening by chance, that it was all predicted by a school of prophets in the first century A.D., and that World developments are following the lines of a script written before the foundations of the World by the only One Who writes history before it happens.
         I want to show you that the global fear I have described here is just the first of a set of distinguishing benchmarks ancient seers set forth to identify the end of human civilization as we know it.


LABOUR PAINS: Pregnant Prophecies
         I find it intriguing that in the most expansive, prophetic vision of the end of our age given by Jesus, He likened the first signs of the end time to "the beginning of sorrows (birth pains)." (Mat.24:8) The question from His disciples could not have been more direct: "When will these things be, and what will be the sign of Your coming, and of the end of the World?" Jesus laid out the identifying marks of the end of the age in two stages--the beginnings of birth pains and the actual labour.
         Putting the prophecies of Jesus together with the prophecies of three others--Jude, Peter and Paul--we see that the beginnings of the birth pains are:
         1. A significant and widespread increase in famines. (Mat.24:7)
         2. A significant and widespread increase in earthquakes. (Mat.24:7)
         3. A dramatic increase in the number of phony "messiahs." (Mat.24:4,5,23-24)
         4. A radical increase in national and ethnic wars and war rumors. (Mat.24:6)
         5. A predominance of intellectual and religious scoffers who ridicule the notion of the waning era of Man or of any impending catastrophe. (2Pet.3:3-5; Jude 18-19)
         6. A radical degeneration in the collective character of Man. (Mat.24:12; 2Tim.3:13)
         These six beginnings signify that actual "labour" cannot be far away. If these prophecies are indeed true, then we are witnessing the beginning of the end of the Earth as we have known it.


1. The Famine Phenomenon
         After thousands of years of human history, the last 120 years have witnessed the most devastating famines in the age of Man. In the 1870s a famine swept the Deccan plateau of southern India, killing five million people. In that same period, a famine in China killed nine million. In the late 1960s and 1970s, lack of rain produced widespread famine in a region of Africa called the Sahel. This brought starvation to parts of Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Chad and the Sudan. In that same time period, famine struck parts of Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia.
         Famine struck Africa again in the 1980s. The Ethiopian part of that famine was catastrophic. Since the late sixties, millions upon millions of Africans have died of hunger or hunger-related causes.
         But not all famine is a function of drought or natural disaster: Famine has become a military strategy in many parts of the World. In the Nigerian civil war in 1967-70, armies deliberately created a famine to starve their enemies into submission. They destroyed crops and stores of food, set up blockades to interdict* the flow of foodstuffs and purposely starved more than a million Biafrans. Throw in the effect of military defoliants and radiation from limited nuclear weapons, and we can project even more war-induced hunger and death. *(interdict: to prohibit or forbid)
         We can't blame God for such famine. Most of these problems are caused by Man's own injustices and foolishness over the years, sometimes centuries. When the population of a country mishandles its water, soil, trees and natural resources, erosion and desolation often result.
         Also, there is a huge surplus of food in other parts of the World--millions upon millions of tons a year--so God has provided more than enough so that no one needs to go hungry! But while the Western World spends hundreds of millions of dollars on storing or destroying these surpluses, and on lavish exercise and dieting programs to lose weight, and subsidises and pays farmers not to grow crops, the poor nations of the World starve!
         Even when the rich of the World are touched to help the needy, the roads into famine-stricken areas are often either disintegrating or virtually non-existent, trucks and heavy vehicles are a rarity and break down continually, and few planes are available to fly in relief. And this is not to speak of the greedy and corrupt officials and middlemen siphoning off a large part of this. In short, the countries which need help the most have an infrastructure which is so undeveloped and officials so corrupt that it makes it almost impossible to help them.
         If you are sickened by pictures of hollow-cheeked babies, bloated bellies, shriveled breasts and skeletal rib cages in the World press, brace yourself. The "famine century" is yet to climax. There are 950 million people who are hungry, with 400 million of them on the verge of starvation. Every year more than 20 million people die of starvation, malnutrition and hunger-related diseases, including 40,000 children who die every day. This means that 46 people died of starvation since you started reading this section on famine.


2. A Whole Lot of Shakin' Going On
         Jesus predicted that the increase of earthquakes would be one of the beginning signs of the end of the age. He had it right.
         It's not that earthquakes are a new phenomenon. Antioch, Syria, not far from the place where Jesus gave His quake prediction, lost a quarter of a million people to a major earthquake in AD 526. Central China lost 830,000 in 1556. But a listing of recorded history's greatest quakes indicates that 57 of the 79 most lethal ones have occurred in the last 83 years. If you want an idea of the trend, the number of people killed in earthquakes in the 70s and 80s was 1,148 percent the number killed in the 50s and 60s.
         Jesus specifically said that these endtime earthquakes would occur in various places, or in His Words, "in diverse places." In geographical distribution, all but one of the 22 major quakes recorded prior to 1900 occurred in Eurasia. But the 57 biggies since the turn of the century have shaken up places as diverse as San Francisco and Tokyo, Guatemala and Algeria, China and Pakistan, Italy and Chile, Iran and El Salvador, the Soviet Union and Mexico.


3. A Mess of Messiahs
         I would be the first to affirm that the World is in desperate need of a messiah, a supernaturally endowed deliverer from the mess of the present age. But I never would have imagined that the demand for messiahs could dictate the supply. Messiahs seem to be trampling over each other to save the World.
         From the Rev. Sun Moon to Lord Maitreya, from the son of a long dead pharaoh and Queen Nefertiti to Allen-Michael Noonan, more self-proclaimed messiahs have appeared in the last thirty years than perhaps in any similar span of time in human history.


4. An Endless Series of Wars
         Something strange has happened to warfare. Don't get me wrong--the object is still to annihilate as many of the enemy as possible as efficiently as possible. That hasn't changed, but the method of carrying out that objective has become radically different in the last thirty or forty years.
         In the "good old days" of bloodshed, armies amassed their troops in rather well-defined geographical areas. Once there, they established rather clear lines facing each other and endeavored to blow the other guys to hell with firepower. This basic method of warfare prevailed from the very first recorded wars to the mid-twentieth century.
         Not any more. In the middle of this century began the era of terrorist wars. In these wars you never quite know where the enemy is; he doesn't have nice, neat lines. You never know quite who he is; you can't even be sure he will be wearing a uniform. You never know quite when he will strike; he might attack only at night and pursue a regular job during the day or take a breather for a week. And you never can be sure you are fighting a war; it could be more like hit-and-run skirmishes spread over decades.
         Vietnam was the first major conflict the U.S. got into in which the enemy fought under these new rules. It frustrated the army boots off our military. We knew if we could just get the enemy all together in one place in nice, neat lines like we were able to do in World War I, World War II, Korea and our earlier wars, we could blow them to kingdom come. But it didn't work that way. Vietnam was not a war. It was an endless series of skirmishes--a whole plethora* of wars. *(plethora: excessive fullness; too much; superabundance)
         Sound familiar? Jesus predicted not that there would be occasional "event" wars, but that in the final days there would be a proliferation of wars and war rumors.
         He also predicted that this endtime proliferation* would create more than just national, "kingdom against kingdom," wars. Jesus said there would be racial and ethnic wars as well. The word usually translated "nation" is the Greek word ethnos, from which we get our word ethnic. Asia, Africa and the Middle East are filled with ethnic wars in addition to national ones. *(proliferation: a spreading; propagation)


5. Laughing Uniformitarians
         How would you like to give some leading religious and secular intellectuals a good laugh? I know a super way to do it.
         With a straight face suggest you believe that at some specific, historic time the Earth experienced a major, cataclysmic event which involved global, geologic upheavals and the inundation of the entire planet with water. Cite evidence from fossil remains of sea creatures at the top of Mount Everest. Describe unexplained, water-laid deposits miles deep (as in the Grand Canyon) with no observable process anywhere on Earth for laying such massive deposits.
         You can also suggest that the Earth was once covered by a canopy of moisture creating a sort of global greenhouse and making it tropical. Describe how this could explain tropical, herbivorous animals getting quick-frozen into the ice of Siberia near the Arctic Circle.
         If the intellectuals are not on the floor convulsing with laughter at this point, they either haven't understood you are serious or they are marked by unusual social courtesy. The majority of intellectuals view the World through an evolutionary and a uniformitarian matrix, and such notions appear ludicrous* to them. Let me explain. *(ludicrous: ridiculous, absurd but amusing; causing laughter)
         Thinking in evolutionary frameworks has spread far beyond the world of biological origins. I have sat in graduate school classes and heard professors try to prove that all religious thought has evolved in a near-Darwinian manner from simple to complex.--Imagine, they're now trying to attribute our faith in the Creator to evolution!
         Also foundational to the mindset of most intellectuals is a doctrine called uniformitarianism.* This is the declaration that the physical dynamics governing the World order continue today uniformly as they have in the past. A favourite motto is, "The present is the key to the past." *(uniformitarianism: the theory that geological change is caused by a gradual process such as evolution rather than sudden upheaval)
         This doctrine of uniformity seems pretty reasonable and harmless until you realise that, if enforced, it wipes out major keystones of Biblical teaching and the Christian faith. If there is no room for cataclysms or dramatic, divine intervention in the natural order, then you can forget the notion of the flood of Noah with its geologic upheavals, the incarnation of God in human flesh, miracles, the resurrection and the second coming of Christ.
         Does it strike you as significant that one identifying mark of the end of our age mentioned by the prophets is uniformitarian thinking and widespread ridicule of any challenge to it?
         Listen to an English paraphrase of one of the apostle Peter's prophecies:
         First, I want to remind you that in the last days there will come scoffers who will do every wrong thing they can think of, and laugh at the truth. This will be their line of argument: "So Jesus promised to come back, did He? Then where is He? He'll never come! Why, as far back as anyone can remember everything has remained exactly as it was since the first day of creation."--2Pet.3:3-4.
         Make no mistake. According to the prophecies of the Holy Scriptures, a nearly global acceptance of uniformitarian thinking will mark the Earth's last century. And if you are still smarting from the ridicule you received when you declared your belief in the Biblical flood of Noah, take heart. The next paragraph of Peter's prophecy explains why you got those horse laughs:
         They [the scoffers] deliberately forget this fact: that God did destroy the World with a mighty flood, long after He had made the heavens by the Word of His command and had used the waters to form the Earth and surround it.--2Pet.3:5-6.
         That these arrogant cynics are at work in the religious as well as the intellectual community is clear from Jude's prediction delivered to Christian believers:
         In the last times there will be scoffers who will follow their own ungodly desires. These are the men who divide you, and follow mere natural instincts and do not have the Spirit.--Jude 18,19.


A GOOD MAN IS HARDER TO FIND

         Do you ever get this strange feeling that the collective morality of those in the World around you is deteriorating? Consider a few personality types of our generation as I parade them before you. Do your best to be objective.


The Self-Lovers
         If any generation ever took seriously the lofty ideal of the Golden Rule, it is definitely not this one. In their quest for personal self-satisfaction, many adults of the baby boom generation find themselves seemingly incapable of action that is not self-serving. This preoccupation with selfish concerns is typified in the goodbye letter written by a mother to her small boy in the movie Kramer vs. Kramer. Excusing her premeditated abandonment, she proclaims:
         I have gone away because I must find something interesting to do for myself in the World. Everybody has to and so do I. Being your mommy was one thing, but there are other things too.
         College students traditionally have been avant-garde in pursuing idealism, social justice and humanitarian causes at the expense of self-interest. As recently as the last twenty years, collegians have demonstrated for free speech, pullout from Vietnam, business divestitures in South Africa, protection of the environment and racial equality.
         All that is changing, according to a study done by the American Council of Education. Of the 290,000 college freshmen surveyed, only 57 percent were at all interested in helping people in difficulty compared with 68.5 percent in 1966. Only 27 percent expressed any concern about racial understanding, down from a meager 32 percent in 1985.
         So what are a majority of collegians interested in?--Their own selfish pursuits. In fact, in a 1987 study, more than 75 percent of college freshmen perceived the goal of life to be the accumulation of wealth. Most indicated that the key reason they enrolled in college was to make more money. This contrasts with a figure of only 39 percent who thought that getting rich was an essential goal in a similar survey only twenty years earlier.


Let's Hear It for #1!
         In a rash of best-selling books, authors have captured and promoted the self-love dogma of our age. Robert J. Ringer, writing in Looking Out for #1, declares that a person's morals should be whatever gives him "enough money to be able to comfortably afford the material things [he wants] out of life." Ringer also promoted his self-centered World view in the widely read book, Winning Through Intimidation.
         Ringer exhorts his readers "to eliminate from your life all individuals who claim to possess [the right] to decide what is moral for you. You should concern yourself only with whether looking out for Number One is moral from your own rational, aware viewpoint." Abandoning a friend with deep moral convictions is acceptable, even necessary, to advance your own goal pursuit, especially if the friend's values threaten you with feelings of discomfort or guilt.
         Michael Korda proclaims this same self-exaltation in his book, Success! Korda declares:
         It's OK to be greedy. It's OK to look out for Number One. It's OK to be Machiavellian* (if you can get away with it). It's OK to recognise that honesty is not always the best policy (provided you don't go around saying so). It's always OK to be rich. *(Machiavellian: unscrupulous, cunning; having to do with the Italian statesman Niccolo Machiavelli, who taught that a ruler must use any means, no matter how unscrupulous, to keep in power)
         Korda expands on his philosophy:
         The fastest way to succeed is to look as if you're playing by other people's rules while quietly playing by your own... Nobody minds ruthless, egocentric careerism and self-interest, provided they are suitably screened. If you can undermine your boss and replace him, fine, do so, but never express anything but respect and loyalty for him while you're doing it.


IS IT EVER HARD TO FIND A GOOD MAN!

         Rome was one of the World's greatest civilizations. Its military power is legendary in the annals of conquest. Its engineers built roads, bridges, walled fortresses and aqueducts that are still in use today, two-and-a-half to three millennia later. Its concepts of government have influenced most of the nations of the Western World. Its language is still studied in Western high schools and colleges. Its art and architecture have left their imprint on design and structures over the globe. Its influence created an era of tranquility still legendary, the Pax Romana.
         But the Roman Empire is extinct, as extinct as the dinosaur. Why?
         As Edward Gibbons struggled to identify the causes for the collapse of this mighty colossus in his seventeen-volume classic, The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, he arrived at five factors:
         1. The rapid increase in divorce.
         2. The craze for pleasure.
         3. The building of gigantic armaments when the enemy was within.
         4. The increase in violence.
         5. The decline of religion.
         In short, Rome exhausted its decreasing supply of good people.

(Editor: Some portions of the following text portray some of the sins of our age rather graphically, therefore this is not recommended reading for children.)


The Global Icebox
         Without a consensus of affection, warmth and trust, the World will be spiritually quick-frozen into an intolerable place. Lovelessness will flow like liquid hydrogen over humanity, making every person "breaking-point brittle" to the least provocation.
         There is powerful evidence we are headed this way. New York City looks back a quarter-century to a case that seasoned New Yorkers say marked the beginning of the end of decency. The incident shocked Americans into recognising we had developed a calloused heart. It was the Kitty Genovese case.
         For more than half-an-hour, thirty-eight respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab Kitty in three separate attacks. After the first attack, Kitty screamed, "Oh my God, he stabbed me." After the final attack came the vain shriek, "I'm dying. I'm dying." Citizens in the apartment building across the street opened windows to look. Others closed windows to deaden the noise of scuffling and screaming. All in all, not one of the thirty-eight witnesses did one thing to protect, defend or save Kitty. Any way you view it, the love of thirty-eight human beings for one of their own had grown cold, as Jesus predicted in Matthew 24:12.
         This hideous lovelessness was replayed more recently in Central Park where a number of teen boys repeatedly raped and beat a young woman for fun in an exercise they called "wilding."


THE BAD GUY GLUT: 24-Hour Hell
         Jean Paul Sartre, the French existentialist, wrote a depressing play in which he portrays Hell as a room into which an endless string of evil, ill-motivated people are delivered. Titled No Exit, the play captures, in frightening ways, the horror of being held in a place where you could never escape from evil people. Discounting a lake of fire, weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth, such a collection of people quickly makes Hell Hell.
         The twenty-four hours I spent after disembarking from a plane on a visit to Lagos, Nigeria, were the closest I have ever come to being in Hell. For those of us who have come to expect a common denominator of goodness, good-will, ethical operation, respect and trust in our relatively secure rural or suburban communities, we have little idea what it is like to live in Harlem, in Hell or in Lagos.
         That one day was filled with a variety of terrors, the least of which included being glared at by humanity at every level of society from immigration official to taxi driver, and being treated like scum by the rest.
         Trust based on ethics was non-existent. The pre-reserved and prepaid reservation at the airport hotel turned mythical because someone had bribed someone else to take it away from us. The travel agent had warned us that if the reservation did not exist (his prediction) no refund would be forthcoming (the outcome). The hotel lobby was jammed to the walls with bitter, disgruntled, aggressive people standing guard over their possessions to protect them from the larcenous intentions of covetous people everywhere. Two American missionaries checking out of the hotel told me of fighting off an intruder in their room in the middle of the night--an intruder who escaped with many of their most valuable possessions, including their wedding rings.
         After offering a higher price for a taxi than the others waiting at the curb, we were taken to another "hotel" where we were charged five times the going rate for a filthy, infested room with a "private bath." When we discovered the "private bath" had no running water in either sink, shower or toilet, we reported the matter to the man behind the desk. He let out a cackle reminiscent of a horror movie villain, heaping derision on us for having the stupidity to believe that the "private bath" was really going to be a functioning private bath. He sneeringly handed us a bucket.
         My travelling companion and I selected a second floor room mainly for security reasons and piled furniture against the door. Good thing. More than once in the night we heard the door knob and door being worked for possible entry.
         We had a fitful night trying to sleep in the torridly humid weather. A hair-raising ride to the airport amidst cursing, glaring, teeming humanity. Visions of the dirt, disarray, dinge, deterioration, destruction, demolition and defecation. A metropolis rendered largely inoperative by the stripping of every valuable, usable item that could be carried off. A region where you don't stop at night on the highway for a fallen tree or even a prostrate body on the road lest it be a trap set by roadside bandits. A place where auto steering wheels are locked with iron bars, accessories are commonly stripped off and hubcaps are only temporary.
         The lift-off of our plane the next day was deliriously joyful. I am sure that commercial craft must have sky-written THANK GOD on its way out of Lagos air traffic control. Be assured that was the prayer I breathed as I settled back in my seat.
         I recount this because most of us living outside the slums have no idea what life is like when "evil men go from bad to worse." We are going to find out.


The Brutality Boom
         Rates of violent crime in the nation's largest cities rose 43 percent from 1977 through 1987. Lest you think that this savagery can be explained by population growth, that decadal rate represented a 22 percent increase in violent crimes per 100,000 of population. This Violent Crime Index includes murder, negligent manslaughter, rape, robbery and aggravated assault. The murder rate had doubled in 1980 from the level in 1960. Louis West of the UCLA School of Medicine declared, "Here's a country that's having an epidemic [of violence]."
         By any chance do you have a young person in your home? So violent has the society become that the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics predicts that 83 percent of American children age twelve or under will become victims of actual or attempted violence sometime in their lives if crime trends continue. In fact, in the mid-1980s violent death, including suicide, was the leading cause of death for young people ages fifteen through twenty-four.
         If you think your son or daughter will be safe at school, think again. Every day 135,000 students come on school campuses carrying guns. Many schools have completely removed lockers to eliminate hiding places for drugs and weapons. To eliminate guns, fifteen New York City schools now require kids to enter through metal detectors. Each year, three million crimes occur on school grounds. More than 184,000 students, faculty and administrators were injured last year.
         As I ate breakfast and glanced over today's newspaper an hour before I wrote these paragraphs, I read on the front page, "Boy Shoots Fellow Student During Siege in Anaheim." A teenager took over a high school drama class and shot a kid who dared him to do so. Brutal.
         Unfortunately, our homes aren't protected from the wave of savagery that is promised in the persecution to come. The number of reported cases of child neglect and abuse in 1985 was 1.3 million, representing 1.93 million children. Since police estimate that for every case reported, two or three actual abuses occur, as many as 5.8 million children were probably abused in 1985, with the most common abuses being deprivation of necessities, physical injury and sexual maltreatment.
         Every eighteen seconds a woman is battered in her home, totaling four million women a year. This brutality crosses all socio-economic barriers, "every race, ethnic group and religion. Doctors, lawyers, policemen and judges are abusers. So are unemployed men on the streets," asserts Kathleen Gerety, a program director at Battered Women's Service in Danbury, Connecticut.
         The increasing anarchy of the American home has become so acute that the head of MTV (the rock music cable TV channel) boasts, "We own the ninth graders of America."


Ad Nauseam
         If I am revolted at the thought of torturing myself or others for fulfillment, I am more sickened at the thought of Man and animal engaging in sexual acts, a practice so damnable that the Old Testament Law sentenced both man and animal to death, and proclaimed that any nation which allowed such practices even by visitors or aliens would "vomit out its inhabitants." (Lev.18:22-25)
         Yet bestiality is increasingly common especially in the burgeoning homosexual community. One book reports that one-fifth of all homosexuals admitted to having sexual contact with animals. Charles Shively, a prominent homosexual, wrote an article for the gay Fag Rag entitled, "Bestiality as an Act of Revolution." The Gay Report, a widely read and lauded book in the homosexual community, reports positive testimonials with no apparent shame and no adverse comments from those having sex with a variety of animals.
         As someone keenly observed, "If God doesn't rain judgment on much of modern America, He will owe an apology to Sodom and Gomorrah!"


Rock Around the Clock
         In my high school days, a Tennessean named Elvis Presley angered parents by his sexually erotic pelvic movements as he belted out songs, which, at their worst, were mildly suggestive. I think now most parents would choose Elvis fifty to one over the rock music artists of today. At least Elvis didn't exalt sex, death, gore and Satan.
         Rock music of one form or another (from soft hits all the way to Heavy Metal) is by far the most popular music in America--consider the ratio of rock music radio stations to all other kinds of music stations. In the midst of the rock music craze, the mixing of music with sex, gore, death and the occult has become so common that there are whole categories of rock music pursuing these themes: Black Metal, Death Metal, Gloom Rock and Satan Rock.
         Music groups of these types dress up like freak shows and feature the grossest kinds of violent images accompanied by hard-driving rock music. Performances feature skulls, blood, simulated slashings, mutilations and decapitations. Some performers gnaw on bones or drink blood as part of their acts. This is dark, evil, angry, hate-filled, rebellion-fed music.
         This type of music is now a major movement in the youth culture of the Western World. And just how did music turn this dark in less than a generation? The secret is to be found, I believe, in one other dominant theme of this music--the occult.


Creatures of the Cloven Hoof
         Many performances of Death Metal, Black Metal, Gloom Rock and Satan Rock include occult images, Satanic rites and references to magic. Written into the lyrics are glorifications of Satan and the occult. An acquaintance of mine who, before he gave his life to Jesus Christ, was a reporter covering the rock music scene, told me of being backstage before a major rock concert and observing the performers praying and dedicating their performance to Satan.
         Satan and his cohorts are featured attractions in this form of "entertainment." Dominant fantasy themes of this music include black magic and Satan's underworld. A sampling of the names of the scores of Black Metal groups will make the point:

Axe Witch        Hellion
Cryptic Slaughter        Hell Star
Coven    Heretic
Cloven Hoof      Impaler
Dark Angel       Infernal Majesty
Demon    Omen
Evil Dead        Onslaught
Grave Digger     Possessed
Grim Reaper      Rigor Mortis
Hallow's Eve     Satan
Helloween        Sinner
Hell Hammer      Warlock

         While a few of the above groups are now defunct, their recordings are still being played across the land. Their mix of blood and guts, death and the occult is captured in the lyrics of a Megadeath song, "Good Mourning, Black Friday":
         Killer, intruder, homicidal man, If you see me coming, run as fast as you can. A bloodthirsty demon who's stalking the street, I hack up my victims like pieces of meat.

         The rock group Possessed proclaims:
         I drink the vomit of the priests, make love to the dying whore .... I am decreed by Lord Satan's fine evil to destroy what all mortals love most. Satan, my master incarnate, hail praise to my unholy host.

         Sales of the records, tapes, compact discs, T-shirts and paraphernalia of these groups total in the billions of dollars. It is quite possible that if you have a teenaged devotee of hard rock music, he owns an album from one of these groups. He certainly has heard the music on one of the many "underground" radio stations, on the MTV cable channel or at the houses of his friends. The occult-glorifying messages being consumed by millions is working its way into your teen's mind.
         Dr. Paul King, a child psychiatrist who treats disturbed teens at a Memphis, Tennessee clinic, says the violent drug abusers he treats are "by and large into Heavy Metal. The music doesn't make them do it, but the lyrics become their philosophy."
         Violent, occult-inspired crime has become the new wave of law-breaking in America. "In the '60s, the cutting edge was drugs," says Washington journalist Larry Kahaner, author of Cults That Kill, a 1988 book which has become a helpful guide to law enforcement in understanding occult crime. "In the '70s, it was computer crime. In the '80s, it was terrorism. Occult crime is really the crime of the '90s."


INTO THE BLACK HOLE

         I believe strong evidence exists that worldwide persecution has begun on those who have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Christians are the most widely hated and persecuted group of people on Earth today. Marxists persecute Christians from the Red Chinese communes to the Cuban prisons to the midnight disappearances in Ethiopia and Mozambique. Muslims persecute Christians from the hostage cells of Lebanon to the terrorist attacks in Morocco, Libya, Algeria and the Sudan. Animists* persecute Christians at the instigation of their occult witch doctors in many parts of Africa and Asia. Approximately 310,000 Christians were martyred worldwide in 1988. *(animists: those who believe that there are living souls in trees, stones, stars, and other objects)
         According to the World Christian Encyclopedia, Christians in two-thirds of the nations of the World are experiencing some form of "religio-political restrictions," ranging from limitations on political freedoms and civil rights to outright attempts to suppress or eradicate their faith. Some 30 percent have no political freedom or adequate civil liberties. Approximately one-fourth live under anti-Christian regimes while 13 percent live under atheistic ones. Nearly 17 percent are "experiencing severe state interference in religion, obstruction or harassment."


Persecution in the U.S.A.
         In the U.S. the most vicious attacks on Christians come from the gay and lesbian communities, the pro-abortion community, the national women's movement, the radical civil libertarians, the pornography industry, the television and film industries, and the political far left.
         The homosexual community viciously harassed and badgered singer Anita Bryant and her husband a number of years ago after Ms. Bryant took a public stand against a Dade County, Florida, proposal that would give special legal status to homosexuals. Followed from city to city by gays, Anita and her manager/husband Bob Green received repeated death warnings, had concert after concert broken up by bomb threats and were locked out of contracts to perform. I attended one concert which was menaced by a bomb threat, picketed by gays and interrupted by a drug-using protester wearing a shirt linking Anita Bryant to fascism.
         Moguls of the pornography industry filed a harassment suit against members of Ronald Reagan's President's Commission on Pornography, demanding incredible financial damages. The helpless members of this official governmental commission, who were serving their country and their President at great personal cost and without pay, had all of their personal assets threatened. Dr. James Dobson, founder and president of Focus on the Family and a member of the President's Commission, told me of the debilitating impact that suit was having on him, his family and his ministry.
         Porn publications, even the "less hard-core" magazines available in most convenience stores, are now the nation's leading forum for anti-Christian propaganda. They take great delight in ridiculing and damning the "religious right wing" and in lumping all Christians together as "fun-hating fundamentalists."
         But mainstream film and TV producers are becoming decidedly anti-Christian as well. No sooner had the processing fluids dried on the film The Last Temptation of Christ than Universal Pictures was presented with a movie script in which evangelical Christians were the villains. No word has come out of the studio as to whether they intend to produce it, but even if they do not, I believe another studio will.
         The American Civil Liberties Union pursues an unceasing bitter campaign of legal harassment against Christians, Christian symbols and Christian practices, and Judeo-Christian values. In an incredible twisting of the principles of freedom of speech, freedom of religion and separation of church and state, this organization pursues efforts to legalize all forms of pornography (including child porn), legalize and legitimize all kinds of deviant sexual behavior as "victimless crimes" and expunge all vestiges of religious faith from public life.
         Churches, Christian schools and other Christian structures have been the target of lawsuits by the ACLU all over America. Having debated ACLU representatives and lawyers on national radio and on television, I can say that those I debated were viciously anti-Christian.
         Of even more concern is that such pointed, anti-Christian litigation is now being proposed by none other than the American Bar Association itself. In a seminar held in San Francisco in May of 1989, and sponsored by the Division for Professional Education of the ABA, attorneys were trained in the "expanding use of law against religions" and "law as an ideological weapon." The event brochure promoted the seminar for "attorneys who want to be on the leading edge of an explosive new area of law."


The Screws Are Tightening
         The mood is getting increasingly ugly for Christians. Soon, I predict, overt persecution of believers will be commonplace. Our kids will be beaten up and sexually molested at school, forced to perform perverse acts by the youthful agents of the dark side. Our churches will be desecrated and worship services disrupted. Our homes will be vandalized and our lives threatened. Our cars will be damaged and our tires slashed.
         KFI Talk Radio, one of the oldest and biggest Los Angeles radio stations, recently had two call-in talk shows on the subject, "Is Christianity more trouble than it is worth?" Imagine the station doing that with Jews, Muslims, Hindus or atheists.
         And while I did not sympathize with evangelist Jim Bakker's financial misdeeds, it's interesting that he received a forty-five-year sentence with no parole for ten years--while convicted drug dealers serve an average of only 15.5 months in jail, according to former federal drug czar William Bennett.
         So persecution is growing, and dark days lie ahead for many Christians.--But we can still look forward to the brightest future of all, for Jesus will return, as the Bible prophesies, and the day of His return grows ever closer. Until that time, be brave!
         In college men's glee club we sang:
         "Give me some men who are stouthearted men who will fight for the right they adore.
         Start me with ten who are stouthearted men, and I'll soon give you 10,000 more!"

         That's the appropriate response. But most of the Church has been singing:
         "Give us an out 'cause we don't have the clout to engage in a war for the right.
         Head out the back with our straggly pack, and we all can be gone overnight!"

         A Christian who won't stand for something will fall for anything. Will you stand up for the right? God bless and keep you till Jesus comes!

Picture Captions, copyright notice:

Jobless in Texas--The modern nightmare

Babies with AIDS in Romania

VOLUME 1, ISSUE 2 -- MARCH, 1992. DFO
THE CHRISTIAN DIGEST IS A STRICTLY NON-PROFIT PUBLICATION. THIS BOOKLET IS PRIVATELY PUBLISHED AND CIRCULATED WITHOUT COST, AND UNDER NO CONDITIONS WHATSOEVER IS IT TO BE SOLD.

In Ethiopia, a woman scrounges food for her hungry children

Girl fetches water through the ruins of an Iranian town hit by an earthquake

"Gay Pride" marchers

Ozzie Osborne, heavy metal singer