Friday, January 17, 2014

7 Years and Then 7 Years

Remember the story of Joseph in Egypt??  The Lord clearly told him that he would have 7 years of plenty followed by 7 years of drought.  Joseph then new to save up tons of food during the first 7 years because there would be misery the following 7.

Lots of 7's in that Bible story.

So this article today kind of caught my attention.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 15 (UPI) -- The International Monetary Fund's Christine Lagarde said in Washington Wednesday she's hopeful the past seven tough years will give way to seven strong ones.

Speaking at the National Press Club in Washington, Lagarde, the IMF's managing director, said while the economic "crisis still lingers," "optimism is in the air."

"My great hope is that 2014 will prove momentous in another way -- the year in which the 'seven weak years,' economically speaking, slide into 'seven strong years,'" she said.

"Is this wishful thinking? No, but it will not simply happen on its own. Getting beyond the crisis still requires a sustained and substantial policy effort, coordination and the right policy mix."

Lagarde said updated forecasts that are still being finalized indicate the global economic momentum that gathered in the second half of 2013 should strengthen further this year on the shoulders of the world's advanced economies.

However, she said, deflation poses a significant risk that "could prove disastrous for the recovery."

Hmmm....so the leader of the International Monetary Fund, no doubt operating from worldly principles vs. biblical ones, believes that our 7 bad years are going to be followed by 7 good ones!!

Holy upside down!!

Up is down, down is up, right is wrong and wrong is right.

Maybe this has nothing to do with anything, but I thought is was interesting all the same.

One thing for sure, the world's god is money so those of us who know the One True God should not put much credence in what the leader of the IMF says or does.


Thursday, January 16, 2014

Another Day...Another Perverted Woman

What is up with all these older women having sex with young boys??

We have posted on this in the past but another case just made the news.

Arkansas woman Andrea Clevenger, one of the mothers featured on the TLC reality show “Cheer Perfection,” has been charged with the rape of a 13-year-old boy after turning herself in to authorities Tuesday.
According to KARK, the 33-year-old was charged with one count of rape and one count of engaging children in sexually explicit conduct for use in a visual or print medium.
Police started to investigate the case after receiving a tip from the Arkansas Child Abuse Hotline on Nov. 27.
An arrest affidavit dated Jan. 13 revealed that the boy knew Clevenger’s family. On Nov. 8 he visited Clevenger’s home in Sherwood, Ark., where she allegedly made advances on him that resulted in the two having sex on a couch.
The victim also told police that this was not his first encounter with Clevenger, explaining in an interview that they had oral sex two different times in October . The boy said both instances took place in Clevenger’s car.
Forensic investigation of the boy’s cell phone also revealed that Clevenger had sent him pornographic images.
We maintain that this increase in perverted women (seriously...what kind of 'normal' woman wants to have sex with a young teenage boy?) is a barometer for how far gone our society has become.  
Apostle Paul seems incredulous when he starts to describe perversion in men, which is not surprising, but then goes on to say that even their women had turned into perverts.
Romans 1
26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Driest Year EVER Recorded in California

Sounds like the drought in California is getting very serious.  2013 is being reported as the driest year EVER!

As California struggles through a run of historically dry weather, most residents are looking at falling reservoir levels, dusty air and thirsty lawns.
But meteorologists have fixed their attention on the scientific phenomenon they say is to blame for the emerging drought: a vast zone of high pressure in the atmosphere off the West Coast, nearly four miles high and 2,000 miles long, so stubborn that one researcher has dubbed it the "Ridiculously Resilient Ridge."
Like a brick wall, the mass of high pressure air has been blocking Pacific winter storms from coming ashore in California, deflecting them up into Alaska and British Columbia, even delivering rain and cold weather to the East Coast. Similar high-pressure zones pop up all the time during most winters, but they usually break down, allowing rain to get through to California. This one, ominously, has anchored itself for 13 months, since December 2012, making it unprecedented in modern weather records and leaving researchers scratching their heads.
"It's like the Sierra -- a mountain range just sitting off the West Coast -- only bigger," said Bob Benjamin, a forecaster with the National Weather Service in Monterey. "This ridge is sort of a mountain in the atmosphere. In most years, it comes and goes. This year it came and didn't go."
Last year was the driest calendar year in recorded history in California in most cities, with records going back 160 years. The first snowpack reading in the Sierra Nevada earlier this month found a snowpack of just 20 percent of normal.
Holy high pressure ridge!!  It's like a gigantic mountain range of high pressure parked off the coast that doesn't allow any rain clouds to get through it....and it is totally blocking California!!  This one has "ominously" stuck around for over 13 months making it 'unprecedented" in modern weather records!!!!
Boy-oh-boy....what would happen to the land of fruit and nuts if it doesn't rain?  Where would all those millions of people get the water to flush, wash, water their country clubs and fill their swimming pools??  
How much would a house be worth in beautiful San Francisco if there was no water except what could be brought in on a truck??  Guessing that would collapse the economy.
"But Dennis, I don't live in California so I don't really care what happens there."
Just do a quick Google search and figure out how much of this nation's food comes from California and all of it is grown on land that is irrigated from reservoirs which are now almost empty.  You will quickly figure out WHY a severe drought in California DOES affect everyone in America.
Hmmm.....we have said for years now that what happens in California seems to spread through the entire nation.  
I wonder if this lack of rain has anything to do with gay marriage, gay lifestyle worship, porn industry, rampant divorce, numerous abortion clinics and massive amounts of immorality that run wild in Hollywood, San Francisco and other California cities?
After all, God used droughts in ancient Israel to get their attention....

Israel Has 8 Years Left

Hamas is a terrorist organization that rules the Gaza strip.  They kicked out their LESSER/WEAKER terrorist brothers, Fatah, and made them all flee into the West Bank.  I believe this mini civil war happened back in 2009.

Mahmoud Abbas is recognized as the current President of the PLO and he is in the Fatah party.  The West, believes Abbas is a "moderate" and they carry on negotiations with him when talking about a new Arab state in Palestine.

I think its funny because he can't even control the Gaza strip....how does the world believe he is going to keep control of a new Arab state?

And here is what a leader of Hamas is saying about Israel;

Hamas Interior Minister Fathi Hammad predicted on Monday that Israel has only eight years left before its demise.
“We are coming after the Zionists with all our leaders and soldiers,” Hammad said. “You have only eight years on the land of Palestine before your demise.”
Hammad was speaking during a military parade organized by Hamas on the fifth anniversary of the IDF’s Cast Lead Operation in the Gaza Strip.
Masses of Palestinian forces loyal to the Islamic movement took part in parades marking the IDF's three-week offensive against Hamas terrorists in the coastal encalve.
The army’s 22-day-long offensive was launched on December 27, 2008 and ended on January 18, 2009.
Hammad said the Palestinians were marching toward victory and have forgotten past “setbacks.”
“We are still on the threshold of an Islamic march and we will enter the Aksa Mosque as liberators, by God’s will.”
Please allow me to paraphrase what he is saying in that last sentence, "By Allah's will we will enter the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and take it back from the Jews who wrested it from us in 1967."
Psalm 83:4
"Come," they say, "let us destroy them as a nation, that the name of Israel be remembered no more."

Yeah, sorry you haters of Israel....that simply is not going to happen.

Amos 9:15
"I will plant Israel in their own land, never again to be uprooted from the land I have given them," says the Lord your God.

Hat tip to Julie E.

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Why Would Anyone Get Married?

If you didn't know Jesus and you didn't fear the Lord....why would anyone get married?

If you are a 25 yr old guy, living in your mom's basement, having her cook and clean for you so you can head out to the bars and fornicate with a bunch of different women....many of which are super willing for a one-night-stand...why would you get married??

Even if you really started to like one woman in particular...why would you buy the cow if she is offering you the milk for free?  Almost everyone you know is saying that marriage sucks or is already divorced....what's in it for you??

Here is just further evidence that our country is on the edge of the abyss....and the politicians will have NO WAY of bringing us back from it.  We are now in the realm of realizing that the ONLY chance we have to turn this river around and make it flow the correct way...is to have God intervene and spark a CHRISTIAN REVIVAL.

If President Obama wants to reduce income inequality, he should focus less on redistributing income and more on fighting a major cause of modern poverty: the breakdown of the family. A man mostly raised by a single mother and his grandparents who defied the odds to become president of the United States is just the person to take up the cause.
"Marriage inequality" should be at the center of any discussion of why some Americans prosper and others don't. According to Census Bureau information analyzed by the Beverly LaHaye Institute, among families headed by two married parents in 2012, just 7.5% lived in poverty. By contrast, when families are headed by a single mother the poverty level jumps to 33.9%.
And the number of children raised in female-headed families is growing throughout America. A 2012 study by the Heritage Foundation found that 28.6% of children born to a white mother were out of wedlock. For Hispanics, the figure was 52.5% and for African-Americans 72.3%. In 1964, when the war on poverty began, almost everyone was born in a family with two married parents: only 7% were not.
Attitudes toward marriage and having children have changed in America over the past 50 years, and low-income children and their mothers are the ones who are paying the price. The statistics make clear what common sense tells us: Children who grow up in a home with married parents have an easier time becoming educated, wealthy and successful than children reared by one parent. As the Heritage study states: "The U.S. is steadily separating into a two-caste system with marriage and education as the dividing line. In the high-income third of the population, children are raised by married parents with a college education; in the bottom-income third, children are raised by single parents with a high-school diploma or less."
One of the differences between the haves and the have-nots is that the haves tend to marry and give birth, in that order. The have-nots tend to have babies and remain unmarried. Marriage makes a difference. Heritage reports that among white married couples, the poverty rate in 2009 was just 3.2%; for white nonmarried families, the rate was 22%. Among black married couples, the poverty rate was only 7%, but the rate for non-married black families was 35.6%.
Certainly by now we all know that bastards have a MUCH HIGHER CHANCE of ending up on drugs and in prison than children raised with a father in the home.  Guessing that legal pot coming soon to a state near you is NOT going to help that mess.
72% of all black babies are born to single mothers??  How is that even possible??  Answer:  because of legalized abortion and welfare.
What??
Yep. 50 years ago if a black man got a woman pregnant and they weren't married, her daddy would organize something called a "shotgun" marriage...and the community would pressure the man to marry and stay with the woman he violated. 
Today when a black woman gets pregnant the boyfriend says, "Abort that fetus!"  And if she refuses then he says, "Then that ain't my problem anymore!!  This kid is now YOUR CHOICE and I'm outta here!"
Then the woman goes to see her friends and they say, "Aww baby, you don't need that thug anyway!!  We all got babies here and we don't have any men in sight!!  Who needs em!!  All you have to do is go to Building #706 on 2nd Street and get signed up for the "free money" that the government owes to single women with children."
But watch how POLITICALLY INCORRECT that telling the truth has become.  There isn't a white man in the world who could dare tell the truth about the problems in the black and Hispanic communities!!  Reverend Jessie Jackson would have a hernia!!
Oh yeah....Ari Fleischer is the author of this article and he is a Jew.....I wonder if that will make people even more upset as the discussion about "the haves" vs. "the have-nots" continues to heat up?
Of course the Democrats will say, "We need to give the poor people MORE MONEY!!  And we need to take it from the rich people who have it all!!"
Can you start to understand how societies end up melting down??  What kind of glue will their be to hold it together when the family becomes a quaint idea that only those "Bible bangers" cling to...along with their guns?

Online Currency

Just a few decades ago any readers of Revelation would have read the part about Antichrist requiring a mark to buy or sell anything and would have said, "That HAS TO BE a spiritual statement...something we simply can't understand...because there is NO WAY that most of the world could EVER be using the same financial system...it is technically impossible!!"

Today, as Daniel and Revelation have been unsealed, we can clearly see how simple this will be...just by using a few laptops and some scanning software that many companies are already using.

Some may have already heard about BITCOIN which is an online currency that seems to be gaining some traction...but there are more.

Last month, we subjected readers to a hindsight lament: How you should have spent $100 at the beginning of 2013. Using the Forbes time travel machine, we went back to last January and dropped Benjamins on a slew of investments, including gold, Google and Bitcoin. We thought the best choice was Bitcoin, which was worth 50 times as much by year end, but we were wrong. The best way to spend a c-note on January 1, 2013 was on competing cryptocurrency Litecoin. Worth seven cents then, its value increased along with Bitcoin’s, reaching $23 by December, or 328 times its initial value. That means a $100 investment in Litecoin last year would be worth $30,000 now.

Litecoin is one of many alternative cryptocurrencies — or altcoins — that have popped up in Bitcoin’s wake. The creators of at least 70 different altcoins took Bitcoin’s source code and tweaked it. They created BBQCoin and Coinye — much to Kanye West’s disapproval — and Dogecoin — based on a meme — and Stalwartbucks — as a journalistic exercise from Business Insider. The Washington Post’s Timothy Lee has a nice explainer on why people are creating these. Some are serious; some are not. But that’s the thing that makes people so skeptical about digital currencies: they’re pretty easy to create out of thin air. They remain as valuable as thin air until people invest faith in them, by loading code onto their computers and participating in their networks, or by spending actual money to buy them.

Here;  http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/01/13/a-100-worth-of-litecoin-a-year-ago-is-worth-30000-today/?google_editors_picks=true

You gotta love that quote, "They remain as valuable as thin air until people invest faith in them..."

You gotta have faith!!!!!!  Yes!!!  All money systems require faith...maybe that's why Jesus was so clear about not worshipping GOD and MONEY.

So how might this all play out?? 

Here is one possible scenario to ponder;
The Rapture of the church makes millions of Christ followers to vanish....just as Paul clearly told us....chaos ensues, Antichrist comes on scene with explanations, and says "We ALL NEED to pull together to stop the chaos!", and people around the world are so eager for a leader that MOST will follow his lead.  He tells folks that cash is dirty, spreads disease (pestilence) and is used by criminals, so in order to stop the chaos ALL PEOPLE need to become part of the NEW SYSTEM...and it will be an online currency of some sort....and the MARK OF THE BEAST will be fulfilled.

Wow!  I guess if you are reading this some time from now and lots of us are already gone...read and understand.

Revelation 13:16-17
"He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name."

BUT DON'T TAKE THAT MARK!!!

Revelation 14:11
"There is no rest day or night for those who worship the beast and his image, or for anyone who receives the MARK OF HIS NAME." (caps are mine)

Yes it's true....the RAPTURE is a sign-less event.  NOTHING has to happen for Christ to return and call us home.  But The Tribulation is going to have all sorts of signs...and MANY of those are starting to come into focus...making us aware that the time is close. 

This should call all of us who are God-fearing followers of Christ to live pure lives and give us an urgency to work hard to spread the Gospel so that the Master will find us working when he returns.

USDA Says 1/3 of Bees Are Gone

Over the years we have posted a few things on the bee population.  According to some folks we have a serious problem with our bees.

"Hey Dennis....I don't really care...I don't like honey."

Albert Einstein supposedly once said that if the world's bee disappear that all mankind will be extinct in 4 years.

"Hey Dennis....I said I don't eat honey so why would I die from no honey?"

The bees serve mankind to pollinate our fruit, nuts and about 1/3 of the foods that we eat. 

I recently saw a movie (which is a new release on Netflix titled MORE THAN HONEY) about the problems with our honey and bees.  I would HIGHLY RECOMMEND this movie....but in it they show the Chinese standing in trees with Q-tips and jars and manually pollinating their trees...since the bees have totally disappeared in parts of China.

Below was in our local news today;

ST. PAUL, Minn. - Two state agencies in Minnesota are working to protect the honey bee population.
The Department of Natural Resources is developing guideline to improve the habitat for pollinating insects that are so important to agriculture. In a report to the state Legislature Wednesday, the Department of Agriculture will outline its plan to study the use of a popular insecticide linked to bee deaths. The Legislature last year instructed agriculture officials to develop a process for reviewing the safety of widely used neonicotinoid insecticides, which are absorbed by plant roots, leaves and pollen.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated that more than a third of the nation's honey bee population has died in the last several years. Minnesota Public Radio says the bees are suffering from persistent disease problems and effects of the insecticides.

Here;  http://www.kare11.com/story/news/local/2014/01/14/state-agencies-develop-protection-for-honey-bees/4471405/

So the USDA is saying 1/3 of the NATION'S honey bees have died in the last several years.....so what if it's 2/3 in the next several years...and 3/3 during the Tribulation that the Bible says is going to come on the whole earth? (yes, I know that 3/3 = 100%)

Many scientists say these little amazing bees are nature's version of the canary in the mineshaft....they are so sensitive to any problems that they serve as a warning to the rest of us.

For now we will file this article under, FAMINE AND PESTILENCE that the Bible clearly says is coming.

Monday, January 13, 2014

NFL or Blood of Christ?

This video was posted and clearly was supposed to be funny....but is it funny??  Or is it a mockery of something that is so serious (our separation from God) that it is truly sad to watch?

Pastor Tim Christensen leads the flock at Gold Hill Lutheran Church in Butte, Montana. Pastor Christensen is also a huge 49ers fan. And the 49ers' playoff game on Sunday directly conflicted with the normally scheduled church service. So Pastor Christensen took matters into his own hands and performed the preaching equivalent of a hurry-up offense. 

You can watch the video above - really, it won't take long - or you can read this transcript below:
Pastor: "Would you all like to be forgiven for your sins?"

Congregation: "Yes."

Pastor: "OK, that's great. You are. Today's message was supposed to be about wine, and servanthood, but you know all about that, right?"

Congregation: "Right."

Pastor: "There's bread and wine on the table, feel free to help yourself. Go in peace to love and serve the Lord." 

He then followed with a not-quite-holy-but-pretty-inspiring Kaepernick-style bicep kiss and Newton-style Superman reveal of his 49ers shirt. And with that, he was out the door. 

Well done, sir. Let's just enjoy this, and not think too deeply on whether the church or the NFL is the most dominant force in American life today. 

Here;  http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/nfl-shutdown-corner/check-out-this-pastor-s-one-minute-pre-football-sermon-164101573.html?soc_src=mediacontentstory

The last sentence in this article from Yahoo is supposed to be funny but in reality is a sad commentary how far we have fallen.  Clearly the NFL HAS become a false god for millions of Americans.  How many spend MORE TIME, effort, money and passion on the NFL vs. spending time, money and passion on serving The Master??

So has the NFL become a more dominant force in American life than Jesus Christ??

Sadly, I think we all know the painful answer.

"You can't serve two masters....."

"Have no other gods before me...."

As many of you know I was raised ELCA....so it comes as no surprise to me whatsoever that this church is part of the ELCA.