The new wine mourneth, the vine languisheth, all the merryhearted do sigh. The mirth of tabrets ceaseth, the noise of them that rejoice endeth, the joy of the harp ceaseth. They shall not drink wine with a song; strong drink shall be bitter to them that drink it. The city of confusion is broken down: every house is shut up, that no man may come in. There is a crying for wine in the streets; all joy is darkened, the mirth of the land is gone. In the city is left desolation, and the gate is smitten with destruction.(Isaiah 24:7-12)
I know many people who are optimistic that we can all go back, after the elections, to the good days we have known in our country for quite some time.They hope that through the political process, we can put “adults” back into power , responsible public servants who will be able to stop the national suicide of reckless spending, non-assimilable immigration, open display of national weakness before our sworn enemies, and to cut the business killing taxes and regulations that have strangled our economy.
I don’t blame them for wanting all of the above. It is a tragedy to realize that in a sane world, these necessary measures could and would be taken, and in spite of the damage done to this productive, innovative and hard-working society, we could yet possibly recover.
But we can’t go back to the freedom, prosperity and seemingly endless opportunity to better ourselves, that we once knew and loved. No matter who wins in November, we will never go back for a number of reasons, some of which I will briefly address.
Why can’t we go back?
We can’t simply return to the prosperous, ‘good years’ because to do so is not merely a matter of cutting away at faulty policies such as over spending, over regulation, waste, corruption, and fraud in Government, as important as all those things are. Our pathologies are all moral and spiritual.
In order to go back, we would have to turn to God, and that will not likely happen on a national basis, without something drastic and painful happening.
Does anyone seriously think we can ever “de-homosexualize” our once Judeo- Christian nation? Could we ever peacefully reverse the utter godlessness, and open hostility to the only true God, and to Jerusalem? Will an election be able to undo the rampant immigration abuse of our political elites, who have created a new constituency for themselves by foisting hordes of takers, (Democrat voters) upon our body politic?
How will we ever undo the calamitous results of the 60’s birth control and abortion revolution, leading to 50 million murdered, the cheapening of human life and the coarsening of men and women? I do not think we can ever go back…
The Psalmist tells us ,“Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD”.
Our freedom and the prosperity that came out of it, came to us as a direct consequence of a Christian worldview. The things that have made America great; the ethic of individual responsibility, the dignity of all work, limited Government, the separation of church and state, checks and balances of power, all spring from a christian worldview.
Our leaders and elites have repudiated the source of these blessings which once distinguished us as a nation. I believe that De Tocqueville warned us that we were only “great because we were good”, but if we ever cease being good, we would cease being great.
Someone else has recently stated that perhaps the nation could survive a term of Obama, but it certainly can’t survive the ignorant, immoral, hateful and racist constituency within, which put him into power.
Millions of Americans, resonate with Obama’s statism, his promotion of sexual deviancy, blatant racial hate mongering, or his complete sympathy with America’s enemies, not to mention his adamant abortion and infanticide advocacy. Many profess to be christian, but they put their biases above their religion, when they vote for him.
For many, as long as the checks are coming from “Obama’s stash”, they are “all in”. We have come to the dreaded “tipping point”, in which those who are in the wagon actually outnumber those pulling the wagon. Obama may go, but his constituency remains.
As for the option to Obama, never forget that Romney is the first Governor to preside as the officiant at a “Gay” marriage, and as Governor of Massachusetts, he advocated the “right” to abortion, even to the point of schools taking girls to clinics without parental notification. Romney is a Mormon as well, which is a polygamous cult!
I hope people will begin to see that what we are experiencing goes far beyond economic or societal decline. The truth is, God “rules in the affairs of men”. The Infinite, personal,Holy God of the Bible is a judge of nations and peoples. To whom much is given, much is going to be required. Have we been recently “Weighed in the balances and found wanting”?
If so, it should be obvious that we can never go back. It’s not just us, however, for the whole world is heading for the final reckoning, the final judgment predicted by the Prophets and apostles of the Bible, so no one can ever “get back” to where they were. It is almost as if we have completed the “seven years of plenty” in Joseph’s dream and are heading into the seven years of want.
When a woman is ready to give birth, she comes to a transition point, at which she often thinks(so I am told), “I don’t want to go through this…”, but it is too late, there is no going back, only forward through the birth process.
Jesus told us that the end of the world will be like that, “birthpangs” leading to a final cataclysm of judgment, and the emergence of the thousand year reign of Christ . There is no question of going back, the only question is are you right with God? Have your sins been forgiven? Do you love this world, or are you longing for the world to come?
Oh that we would see what the times are and what to do about it! Then we would turn to God with all of our hearts, with repentance, confession of sin and faith in Jesus! Even now, God will forgive and save the soul of whoever turns to him.
That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. For the scripture saith, Whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed. For there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek: for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon him. For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.(Romans 10:9-13)
Pastor Bill Randles Blog 
Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord… ~ Psalm 33:12
Thank you, Pastor Randles, for this very timely commentary. One of the most sane I’ve read in a long time. Sharon Nordstrom
Hi Pastor Randles,
While I really appreciated the logic of your latest post, and agree with it, there is one paragraph I think you should take a closer look at:
As for the option to Obama, never forget that Romney is the first Governor to preside as the officiant at a “Gay” marriage, and as Governor of Massachusetts, he advocated the “right” to abortion, even to the point of schools taking girls to clinics without parental notification. Romney is a Mormon as well, which is a polygamous cult!
I looked up Romney’s officiating at a gay marriage and found out this may be just a rumor. Here’s the article in its entirety:
Lawmaker says Romney performed same-sex marriages as governor
Pants on Fire! Share this story:
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has spent a lot of time trying to convince socially conservative voters that he really, really is one of them.
Many, including one Georgia lawmaker, still do not think Romney is a true believer in their social and political principles.
State Rep. Judy Manning, a Republican from Marietta, recently told The Marietta Daily Journal that she thinks the former Massachusetts governor is a flip-flopper and she is supporting Newt Gingrich, the former Georgia congressman who was speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. We thought one of her comments deserved a spin on the Truth-O-Meter.
“When he was the governor of Massachusetts, he performed 100 — and I’m not sure this number is right, but my mind says it’s about 180 gay marriages — and now, when he is running as president on the Republican ticket, he says that marriage is between a man and a woman,” Manning said in the article.
Did Romney actually perform 100 to 180 gay marriages? Didn’t Romney say in a nationally televised debate earlier this month that while he believes gay couples should have basic legal rights, one right they should not enjoy is marriage?
We were curious to find out if Manning was right, particularly since she wasn’t sure about how many marriages Romney may have performed.
Romney spokeswoman Amanda Henneberg denied the claim.
“That is simply and completely untrue,” she said.
We called Manning at her legislative office and at her home and sent the representative an email over the span of a week and did not get a reply.
Romney was elected governor in 2002 and served from 2003 to 2007. In 2003, the Massachusetts State Judicial Court ruled that same-sex couples have the legal right to marry.
Massachusetts has an obscure law that allows family members or friends to perform marriage ceremonies under a one-day marriage designation. The law includes same-sex couples.
In 2006, The Boston Globe reported that Romney approved 189 special-issue, one-day marriage designations to same-sex couples in 2005. The article was a look into Romney’s approach on gay marriage as he considered a 2008 presidential run (which he later lost in the GOP primary). A Romney spokesman said in that article that he was bound by the law and had to approve those one-day marriage designations, although he opposed gay marriage.
Maggie Gallagher, founder of the National Organization for Marriage, wrote a column in December praising Romney’s support for a federal marriage amendment and his efforts to fight against gay marriage in Massachusetts. The National Organization for Marriage has fought against same-sex marriage on the national and local level.
Romney “apparently approved many more, both before and after 2005, but we have not been able to get any records on them,” Steve Baldwin, former executive director of the Council for National Policy, said in a column that appeared in the National Review late last month. “There have been Freedom of Information Act requests to get more documents about this whole issue, but the state government has not been forthcoming.”
Massachusetts officials said their records of one-day marriage designations date back to 2006, not 2005, the year The Boston Globe examined. Massachusetts officials say they do not keep track of how many one-day marriage designations are approved annually for same-sex couples.
MassEquality, a Boston-based group organized to preserve same-sex marriage equality, said Romney has not been supportive of gay marriage, and the group seriously doubted that he performed any ceremonies as governor.
“The notion that Mitt Romney, as governor of Massachusetts, presided over the weddings of same-sex couples is ridiculous,” Executive Director Kara Suffredini told us via email. “To the contrary — and contrary to the promises he made while campaigning for governor — he did everything he could to position himself as the face of the anti-marriage movement, going so far as to revive an arcane and racist anti-miscegenation law to block out-of-state same-sex couples from marrying in Massachusetts. Make no mistake, former Gov. Romney was no friend to loving same-sex couples and the thousands of children they are raising in Massachusetts.”
There’s no evidence that Romney has performed any gay marriage ceremonies. It appears Rep. Manning used the wrong language to describe Romney’s actions as governor because her estimate of how many marriages she thought he performed is very similar to the number of one-day marriage designations that The Boston Globe reported.
Had Manning said Romney approved 100 to 180 one-day marriage designations, her statement would likely be correct. However, she used the word “performed,” which suggests Romney actually officiated the ceremony and created a vastly different impression of the candidate’s stance on same-sex marriage for anyone who read that article.
Sincerely,
Sharon Nordstrom
Thank You Sharon, I am looking into the matter and will post anything I find. I wouldn’t want to pass on a wrong story. here is one of my earlier sources; An Aticle by Alan Keyes called “Romney Responsible for Same Sex Marriage Fiasco” from http://www.wnd.com/2008/02/45869/
Republican presidential candidate Alan Keyes may not get invited to the televised debates but that doesn’t mean he’s going stay out of the fray or attack his opponents when he believes they’ve abandoned his party’s values — particularly on the issue of same-sex marriage.
On his campaign website this week, Keyes blasted former Gov. Mitt Romney for being “single-handedly responsible for instituting same-sex marriage in Massachusetts” for the way he responded to a state court ruling in 2003.
“Most people are unaware of the way Massachusetts came to adopt same-sex marriage,” the former Reagan administration diplomat said. “They think the state’s Supreme Judicial Court forced it to happen. That’s incorrect.”
“The court merely issued an opinion stating that, in its view, the existing marriage law was unconstitutional because it failed to allow persons of the same sex to marry,” Keyes said. “The court then gave the legislature 180 days to ‘take such action as it may deem appropriate in light of this opinion’ — implicitly telling lawmakers to come up with a new marriage statute.”
Noting that the legislature did not act within the court-imposed 180-day window, refusing to let the judiciary infringe on its law-making powers, Keyes said the only reason same-sex marriage became the law was because of Romney’s actions.
“Mitt Romney pushed through same-sex marriage all by himself, in the absence of any authority or requirement to do so, having a complete misunderstanding of his role as governor and of the significance of the court’s opinion,” said Keyes.
“The court never ordered him to act, nor did he have the right to act, since the legislature never changed the law. Romney claimed he had no other choice, but that’s completely untrue.”
Keyes’ charge echoes reporting by WND last July on Romney’s role in implementing ‘gay’ marriage while he was governor.
Romney’s aides told WND that after four of the seven court members reinterpreted the definition of marriage in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, the governor believed he had no choice but to direct clerks and others to change state marriage forms and begin registering same-sex couples.
Constitutional expert Herb Titus ? Harvard law graduate, founding dean of Pat Robertson’s Regent University Law School and former candidate for vice-president on the Constitution Party ticket — said Romney got it wrong.
“What Romney did [was] he exercised illegal legislative authority,” Titus said. “He was bound by what? There was no order. There wasn’t even any order to the Department of Public Health to do anything.”
“All the Supreme Judicial Court did was pronounce their judgment, declared their opinion,” he told WND. “Gov. Romney is like too many other governors in America. If a court says something, they jump.”
Keyes concurred.
“The appropriate course of action for Romney was to do nothing,” he said. Instead, “as governor, he created, in essence, his own same-sex marriage rule and then enforced it — reportedly threatening local clerks with dismissal if they refused to comply with his executive order.”
And while Keyes called Romney’s actions “catastrophic” and “among the most socially-damaging actions by a chief executive in our nation’s history,” their significance lay in the way he would operate as president.
“The failure by Romney to ‘say no’ to corrupt activist judges in a critical controversy over ‘separation of powers,’ and his willingness to take unwarranted steps that exceeded his lawful authority, reveal the kind of chief executive he would be if elected president,” Keyes said.
Titus noted that the Massachusetts Constitution probably is the most specific in the nation on the separation of powers.
“It makes it very clear that … the judiciary doesn’t have either executive or legislative power,” he said. “It specifically rejects any claim of supremacy by any one of the branches over the other.”
But in the Goodridge case, the court said, “We are the supreme expositors on the constitution,” he said, even though the justices admitted reformulating the definition of marriage, “which means they have blatantly exercised legislative power.”
“It was a phony lawsuit … much the same way as they have show trials in the communist countries,” Titus told WND.
Another excellent comment Bill.
I am extremely pleased with the conclusions reached as I believe the dilemma for the committed bible believing christian is that they have NO one to vote for and must therefore be entirely pragmatic about where they eventually cast their vote. All false religion is as bad as no religion at all. Right wing ideology, Fascism, is no better than left wing ideology, communism, when manifested to the extreme levels we are witnessing around the world today.
Your final comments really do sum it up for that extremely rare individual in these last days who might rightly be referred to as the committed bible believing christian determined to remain faithful to His word at any cost:
Oh that we would see what the times are and what to do about it! Then we would turn to God with all of our hearts, with repentance, confession of sin and faith in Jesus! Even now, God will forgive and save the soul of whoever turns to him.
That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. For the scripture saith, Whosoever believeth on Him shall not be ashamed. For there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek: for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon him.
For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.(Romans 10:9-13)
What happens in my house matters more, in God’s sight, than what happens in the White House. Political power is temporary. Offspring with a passion for God and a confident vision of the future[1] are God’s means for us to extend His glory into the next century or two. I hope to live long enough to stand under the night sky and invoke God’s blessings on grandchildren who are honoring Him in their callings on the moon, or Mars. I am eager to attend the baptism of my first grandchild early next year — and would love to see his or her children also conscripted into the ongoing task of celebrating God’s goodness, greatness, and creativity.
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[1] (Not all Bible-believing Christians preach “as gospel” the notion that the game is rigged, and God has already decided to take a dive!)