Shabbat shalom kol beit Yisra'el and Mishpachah and to what is traditionally called Shabbat Shuvah - the last day of repentance before Yom haKippurim, the Day of Atonements, which begins tomorrow evening at sunset. Significantly this year Yom haKippurim falls on the same day here (4-5 October) as it does in Washington, DC and Moscow, the two epicentres of the current political and economic crisis that is threatening the whole world with war.

Traditionally, Shabbat Shuvah is the last day for individuals and - importantly - nations to make things right with Yahweh by turning round and away from rebelliousness and wickedness. This the culmination of the year of Penultimate Judgment - the last great judgment of the nations before the last and Final Judgment at the end of the æon or age, is the last opportunity for the superpowers to make peace or risk a global conflagration. But it is far more than that. This isn't just a question of nations vying for world hegemony or survival. In the heavenly courts above, all the nations are about to come under divine scrutiny and punishment rendered. Why now? Because, in the immortal words of the wife of the late evaangelist Billy Graham, I guarantee to you that Yahweh is not about to apologise for Sodom and Gomorrah, He is not about to apologise for Moloch, or Bacchus or Kali or Forneus or any of the currently ruling and destructive demons of the nations that wicked men and women have invited to be their Elohim-hating and -mocking territorial hegemons in the invisible realm. He will never do that. Yahweh has shown great forebearance. His grace (undeserved loving-kindness) has been extended but now He is demanding that every individual and nation give an account in the heavenly realm. For this is not only the annual season of priesthood weighing but it is the æon of national weighing too. This is one of those critical hinge points in history.

This is therefore not a good time for denying the existence of Elohim (God) because everyone is going to desperately need Him because of what the nations are reaping for themselves. Nor is it is a good time to merely acknowledge He exists but to refuse to trust and obey Him. That's what the demons do. This really is the 'day before', the end of the last Act-but-one in the drama that is earth's story. Many actors are about to be removed, the whole cast is about to be reshuffled, empires are about to end and new ones are about to arise for the last time ever.

Yah'shua (Jesus) once taught this famous parable about stewardship:

"...keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour.

"Again, it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted his property to them. To one he gave five talents of money, to another two talents, and to another one talent, each according to his ability. Then he went on his journey. The man who had received the five talents went at once and put his money to work and gained five more. So also, the one with the two talents gained two more. But the man who had received the one talent went off, dug a hole in the ground and hid his master's money.

"After a long time the master of those servants returned and settled accounts with them. The man who had received the five talents brought the other five. 'Master,' he said, 'you entrusted me with five talents. See, I have gained five more.'

"His master replied, 'Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master's happiness!'

"The man with the two talents also came. 'Master,' he said, 'you entrusted me with two talents; see, I have gained two more.'

"His master replied, 'Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master's happiness!'

"Then the man who had received the one talent came. 'Master,' he said, 'I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed. So I was afraid and went out and hid your talent in the ground. See, here is what belongs to you.'

"His master replied, 'You wicked, lazy servant! So you knew that I harvest where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered seed? Well then, you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers, so that when I returned I would have received it back with interest.

"'Take the talent from him and give it to the one who has the ten talents. For everyone who has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him. And throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth'" (Matt.25:13-30, NIV).

This cosmic rule of multiplication applies not only to individuals but to nations to. In the world we are experiencing a huge redistribution of wealth and resources. Once rich nations are becoming impoverished because of unrepented sin, and once poor nations are becoming wealthier either because of their faithfulness to the Master's commandments or because He gives every nation the opportunity to prove themselves and justify their ongoing existence. Any nation who will defend Elohim (God) and family will be blessed; every nation who turns against Him and attacks the heavenly designed unit of the family will be cursed because they are operating against the created order; and the created order, just like every individual's immune system, has been granted powers to defend itself.

By living sensibly we are able to build strong immune systems and spare ourselves from the inevitable consequences of neglect: disease and premature death. When nations and their ruling powers or governments enact wise laws to protect the 'immune system' of communities, those communities prosper. When they don't, those societies grow sick and die. So blessings and cursings are, in a very real sense, 'built in' - they have been there from the beginning, and this is not about Yahweh suddenly saying, 'Stop!' or 'I will intervene and punish you directly from the Throne Room'. This is therefore an inbuild system of judgment. If we violate His preservation commands, built into our very DNA, there are, as it were, 'natural' consequences. Where He actually does step in and directly intervene, at an appropriate point and usually just before man is about annihilate himself, is when wicked men and women start, for example, tampering with nature itself by altering its inbuilt genetic instructions to follow an entirely different drumbeat of command or to give glory to a usurper.

Over the last century Yahweh has had to personally intervene to stop nuclear annihilation. The Cuban Missile Crisis under the Kennedy administration in the United States is a good example. Many times during the Cold War we came close to starting a man-made Armageddon with weapons of mass destruction. And we are at such a time once more. Not only is there a terrible risk of a nuclear conflagration between NATO and the Russian Federation but our naturally created DNA, with Yahweh's instructiions and Name written on it, is being so abused that He must intervene to prevent mankind destroying itself again, by punishing those responsible. Our DNA, our Immune Systems and the Biosphere as a whole are insuch peril now, not because of any imaginary 'manmade global warming', but because of the evil designs of men. For the sake of the righteous Yahweh must intervene, otherwise His Great Plan will come to naught. And Yahweh never allows anyone to interfere with His overall historical directives.

The issue now is one like that of the Flood and of the Tower of Babel: all demonic projects to utterly destroy mankind and the world will fail even if, as the Book of Revelation is already showing us with great clarity, great losses must, will be, and are being incurred for the sake of free agency, that precious ointment of liberty which is so integral to the character of our Creator that Satan and his demon-steered rebels hate so much. And every move to curtail man's agency is a work of Satan through his earth-bound agents.

We do not, of course, possess 100 per cent liberty. Any responsible parent will tell you that there must be borders that are a function of both age and maturity. There are others, and their agency, to be considered too, so there is a fulcrum or balance. That is why fathers are given authority over their children until they reach a certain age (20, in the case of sons, through traditionally in the West this has been marked down to 18 and is being lowered, by force, more and more by wicked governments) or when they get married (in the case of daughters). We are also limited in our agency to some extent by the rules of households we live in and the organisations we give our voluntary allegiance to. If you join a Church, you agree to certain restrictions and are in return given certain privileges.

I once lived in the household of a very kind Pentecostal Indian family who gave me a roof over my head at nights in the city where I worked when I was homeless for a while. As I was given no key, I had to be there at certain times in order to be able to doss down for the night and I had to put up with what I found personally to be disagreeable habits, like smoking and staying up really late cooking midnight meals and making a lot of noise. It was far from being ideal but it was better than being on the street and being unable to perform at work each morning. It would have been wrong of me to demand that they stop smoking and be quiet after midnight as it was not my home. Another house I once dossed down in had no rules, or very few of them, so I could turn up and there might be no one to let me in, in which case I had to go and sleep on the floor at my place of work. But I was grateful for small mercies until I could find a place to sleep.

Our nations are a bit like that. No nation is perfect. They have their 'household rules' called laws. Wherever you go, you will be able to find fault. There is no ideal, perfect country, and never will be until Yah'shua (Jesus) returns, and I have lived in several. Countries, which are collections of individuals with ruling authorities who are either elected to power by wise or foolish people, or take it by force, likewise change. I have seen nations change beyond recognition in my lifetime. I knew a man who had lived in the time of Imperial Germany, the Weimar Republic, Hitlerite Germany, Communist Germany, and Liberal Germany, under régimes that were wildly different from one another, often brought to sudden power in the aftermath of war.

Even households change. We are witnessing our own governments change, sometimes for good, sometimes for evil. And frankly, the morphing in some nations that's going on now in the direction of evil is frightening. As I have been saying now for some time, we are entering the era of strongmen-rulers as people no longer give their consent to democratic rule. So we cannot measure our rulers by the standards of the past. Given that so many are now willing to embrace totalitarianism and affirm autocracy, we must now judge our options on the basis of which autocrat will be more righteous or wicked. And though for Westerners this is a little frightening, perhaps, since we were born into democracies where people were gracious enough to conceed victory to their rivals or opponents without getting sour grapes after elections or, more menacingly, violent because their objections. So what we have, and what we are getting, is exactly what we deserve.

Indeed, this is how the ancient world was run, before the advent of classical liberalism and democracy. Yes, we should strive to advance classical liberalism, but when the majority no longer want it and refuse to cooperate responsibily with it as mature adults because they have themselves become narcissistic and prefer to remain immature, then strong-man rule is the only option that's left to prevent anarchy...more often than not for the sake of the rightous, no less. Then it's a question of choosing between righteous strong-men and wicked ones...if that choice even exists given the poor quality of politicians vying for power these days. And so it is we are returning to a kind of pagan feudal monarchism.

Such will become - and already is, to a large extent - the world that we must inhabit following Penultimate Judgment. Some will adapt, some won't, and so conflicts will continue. As far as Europe is concerned, those nations that were formerly communist will adapt far better to what's coming than those which were not because they know, from their recent history under communism, what totalitarianism is like and how to live with it. Most of the nations today taking a stand against liberal totaliterianism are formerly Eastern Block (Warsaw Pact & Comecon) nations, with the occasional exception like Italy where there is a strong religious tradition. Where Christianity has become weakened or virtually eradicated, there will be considerably greater difficulties. Why? Because the citizens of these nations, who invariably want the benefits of Christianity but not its responsibilties, duties and self-imposed limitations, will fail to understand the connection between the two and be surprised when they turn into the very people they never wanted to be. That's why you'll still find many wanting the Christian culture of civility, for example, but not Christianity itself because they don't want to be 'religious'. Perhaps some of you have heard of Dr.M.Scott Peck who back in 1993, bewailing the loss of civility in American culture, wrote a book called, A World Waiting to be Born: Civility Rediscovered (the author too of The Road Less Traveled). It is an attempt to show how Americans in particular can preserve Christian values whilst letting Christianity itself slide. Unfortunately it doesn't work like that for those who want Yahweh's blessings but not Yahweh Himself.

What happens in the case of Dr.Peck's ideal citizens and others, is that they end up like the man in Yah'shua's (Jesus') parable who was given one talent and refused to at least invest it in the bank. Of course, Peck didn't realise, 30 years ago, just how tiny to non-existent bank interest rates would be, and Yah'shua's (Jesus') parable is now hard to apply when banks now actually charge you for putting your money on deposit with them...banks too have changed. It's hard to believe, isn't it, that we now pay them to loan them our money! What a topsy-turvy world we live in!. So understand this: Christian culture and values cannot survive more than a generation - two at most - without the living Christianity that created the culture in the first place. The first generation lives only in the afterglow of a post-Christian civilisation but like the dying embers of an unfed fire, in the end both fire and civilisation must inevitably go out. Though Dr.Peck's world is for sure much better than a pagan one, it is unrealistic to expect it to survive once the first generation without Christ has departed. That is why our Western world has become pagan so fast. This is the second generation following the revolutions of the 1960's that toppled Christianity in the West.

One of the great struggles the apostles had was preventing their converts from reverting to their old pagan ways. It is a struggle to maintain separateness (which, incidentally, is where our English word 'holy' comes from) in a pagan culture. Christians in the West are once again in the minority as the Western nations have thrown off all the centuries' worth of work of the evangelists and martyrs. It take a long time to build up a culture, but very little time to tear it down. So we now face exactly the same challenges as the first believers did with the one difference being that we are not 'new' though what we preach is just as challenging today as it was then, only now there is even greater indifference and scepticism. Back then there were no churches. Today there are tens of thosands of them, but most of them are lifeless. Thus Paul would write:

"So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Master (Yah'shua/Jesus), that you must no longer live as the [pagan] Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of Elohim (God) because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, with a continual lust for more.

"You, however, did not come to know Christ that way. Surely you heard of Him and were taught in Him in accordance with the emet (truth) that is in Yah'shua (Jesus). You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like (Elohim) in true righteousness and holiness (set-apartness, separateness)" (Eph.4:17-24, NIV)

The trouble is, we aren't ignorant as those early Gentiles were because basic Christianity and its values have been around for more than a thousand years, and that is why grace cannot be extended as long as it was to the ancient world which knew no better. That is why Judgment cannot now be delayed - most people know the truth, at least in part! Most of the world - and more so the West - know what Christianity is and are choosing to reject its values of decency, honesty, industriousness, virtue, self-effacement and humility.

Moreover, there is no such thing as a 'cultural Christian' without being a 'religious Christian' too. You can't be half-in. You're either all-in, all-out or living under increasingly unbearable tension until you choose fully one way or the other. True shalom (peace) is only realisable by being 'all-in' because being 'in Christ' is our 'natural state' inasmuch as that is the state we were created to be in, and every other state or half-state is 'unnatural' to us. Yes, we can learn to 'adapt' to the unnatural, but we are never wholly at ease with it as a Christian is with his own in-built design. That is why the language of Scripture is so absolute. That's why Yah'shua (Jesus) adopted parables illustrating the impossibility of being part-believer and part-unbeliever, or part-Christian and part-pagan, such as the parable of not putting 'new wine' in 'old wineskins' (Mt.9:17; Mk.2:22; Lk.5:37-38): pagan vessels cannot hold the Christian spirit because the vessel, like a mould, also shapes the spirit...inevitably.

We are leavened - slowly at first, but with increasing rapidity - by the environment we choose to inhabit. Where we habituate becomes our habits, way of life, and eventually redefined worldview. It's a proven fact. That is why the apostles use such language as 'dying to our sins' and not merely shuffling them off to the sidelines where we can still see them and be attracted back to them. Thus Peter wrote:

"He Himself (Yah'shua/Jesus) bore our sins in his body on the tree (cross), so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed. For you were like sheep going astray, but now you have returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls" (1 Peter 2:24-25, NIV)

And so what you live for is in a very real sense also what you have died to. If you are primarily living for yourself or for another human (like a spouse or political leader) being then you have 'died to Christ' instead of 'dying to sins' and you remain in your sins and are quite likely unsaved. It doesn't matter how kind, generous or sweet to others you may be if that is entirely self-derived - take another look at the Kongsberg Vision in the Olive Branch (Chapter 467) if you've forgotten it. And yes, whilst it is certainly better to live that way than to be mean and nasty; because you are mortal and have finite natural resources, you will not be able to be kind, generous or sweet without expecting something in return from those whom you are 'kind, generous or sweet' to. All goodness comes from Christ - it's where those desirable dispositions come from in the first place. We didn't invent or create them - we may have parasitised others for them to some extent - but they are still a finite resource that will be coloured by our own unredeemed personalities. Just push such a person who is living this way hard enough and you will start to see the ugly, unredeemed side quickly enough. In other words, the 'kindness, generosity and sweetness' is counterfeit, for even the devil can imitate these things...for a while, before his real self gets the better of him. So don't be deceived. Humanism without Elohim (God) doesn't work in the long run.

In Christ we have infinite resources because they are coming from an infinite Being. That is what Christian civilisation was founded on. The joke was often told when I was younger that when the pagan Vikings visited our British shores, murdered the locals and took away slaves, the captives would beg for mercy. 'What is mercy?' the Vikings would quip, because it was an alien concept to them. Our whole neopagan 'Cancel Culture' perfectly reflects the old Viking way. It knows nothing of mercy. People are 'cancelled' without the possibility of redemption unless some grovelling, boot-licking apology is made in denial of the truth. There is no Christian grace or undeserved loving-kindness whatsoever because it is a militant atheist Marxist culture. That is why I urge people to study the history of communism (and fascism, for the two are closely related)in the 20th century and why, indeed, history is so important for contrast and perspective.

Marxism was the first raw satanic philosophy to be introduced to Christian Europe that sought Christianity's outright extinction...and by violent means...and especially its concepts of love. Communists fear Christian love more than anything else because it destroys the need and justification for scapegoats on which to blame ones own inadequacies. Marxism thrives on hatred, originally towards the church, the bourgoisie, the aristrocracy and the kulaks, and now towards white people, males, conservatives, heterosexuals and Christians. It's Social Democratic counterpart seeks Christianity's extinction by small increments through the democratic process but the goals of the two - communism and social democracy - are exactly the same. As one Christian babushka (elderly Russian lady) retorted when a communist official asked her why she didn't love Stalin: "Stalin didn't die for me or rise from the dead!"

Though the Soviet rulers and their counterparts in the post-war Eastern Block tried hard to exterminate Christianity, it survived the tortures, beatings, psychiatric abuses, imprisonings and murders. Miraculously, after communism fell in 1991 and with it the Soviet nightmare, Christianity once again rose from representing a mere third of the Russian population to two-thirds in the very short space of 30 years. That is unprecedented. And whatever you may think about the theology, practices and superstitions of Eastern Orthodoxy, it cannot be denied that it, almost single-handedly, was responsible for preserving Christian values such as the centrality of the family and biblical gender rôles (which Marxists hate) that lie at the heart of Christian culture and its success.

Whereas Soviet Marxism attempted to crush the individual and make the state god, the neo-pagan Marxist West has sought to crush (or hijack) all institutions (including science and reason) and deify the individual, and especially his or her feelings, as ultimate truth. Both deny Elohim (God) and claim that either the state is god or the individual is. Messianic Christianity teaches through the annual festivals that both the individual (3 parts) and the collective messianic community or church (4 parts) are important, with both being under the authority of Yahweh in the pure love of Christ.

So this is why the world - and in particular the West - is the way it is. This is why both must now be judged and why, starting tomorrow evening at sunset when Yom haKippurim begins, the axe will begin to fall on the necks of the guilty in high places and low. They are desperate to keep their project for world hegemony afloat. Meanwhile nations, refusing to dissolve themselves in the name of a devilish cause without a future, start choosing to protect their own interests first and in the Name of God (Elohim) and Family. We too must firmly and publically plant our banner: For God (Elohim), Family and Country with good will toward all other nations. Knock any of these pillars down and you will soon find yourself out in the lonely and deadly Atacama Desert where no life can exist.

We will assemble here fasting in two days' time for the sixth annual divine moed or appointment for two short services - one in the morning and one in the late afternoon. This is no symbolic religious ritual, it is Yahweh's own marking of time for an important event that will be forever recorded in our history books. The clash of two worldviews is underway and when it is over and the dust has settled, there won't be any paradise by a long short but there will be some precious time that has been bought to evangelise the world one last time and gather in the elect for the ongoing Last Exodus. It will be the time of the revived Elijah Prophets! May Yahweh be with you as you put your life into order and meet Him for your instructions. Amen.

Acknowledgements

[1] Leonard Ravenhill, Sodom Had No Bible (Offspring Publishers, USA: 1971, 2012)
[2] S.Scott Peck, A World Waiting to be Born: Civility Rediscovered (Bantam, NY: 1993)