“Death to America! Death to America! Death to America!” The chants and shouts of hundreds of marchers echoed off the walls of the buildings and down the streets. Their sentiments were plain to see.

Yet the streets in this scene weren’t those of a Middle Eastern city, and the marchers weren’t people in Iran calling for the downfall of the United States. No, the streets were in a major California city, and the protestors calling for the end of their country were American.

And to make their message perfectly clear, the crowd, many among them declaring support for Black Lives Matter, broke windows, smashed cars, vandalized businesses and attacked police officers.

Perhaps what is most surprising about this scene is that it wasn’t surprising at all. It was only a matter of time before crowds that toppled statues of major American historical figures (including some who played key roles in the nation’s struggle to end slavery), that burned and vandalized hundreds of businesses and that called for the murder of police would at some point end the charade and make their intentions plain for the world to see.

Their goals have been made clear in other chants as well. In addition to the common “No justice, no peace,” marchers have called for the burning of police stations (“Every city, every town, burn the precincts to the ground!”), support of criminals (“Who do we protect? Black felons!”) and overthrow of elected governments (“You can’t stop the revolution!”).

Two very different agendas

A few will stop reading this article at this point and accuse Beyond Today of being “too political” and a tool for right-wing interests. This happens every time we discuss social issues. But our only agenda is God’s agenda. Our Master isn’t a politician, but the coming King of the world, Jesus Christ. And make no mistake: There is a godly, biblical perspective on social issues, and there is an ungodly, anti-biblical perspective on social issues.

Our reason for producing the Beyond Today magazine and television program is to present God’s perspective on what’s happening in the world and to explain it from His Word, the Holy Bible.

The Bible contains many prophecies about conditions in the time leading up to the return of Jesus Christ, and we explain world conditions in the light of Bible prophecy. If you don’t care what God thinks, you might as well stop reading now. But if you want to really understand what’s going on in our world and forces at work to transform America into something very different, read on.

Will we destroy ourselves?

The United States has faced and survived a number of great national crises—World War I, the Spanish flu pandemic, the Great Depression, World War II, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the 9/11 terror attacks. But the crisis the nation now faces is different. Now it’s a self-inflicted crisis of our own making.

There are now many at work within the country trying to bring it down. The recent rioting gives us a striking example, especially as we examine the underlying aims of many of the agitators.

One of America’s most beloved presidents, Abraham Lincoln, was a student of history and understood the danger that can come from within. Long before the opening volleys of the Civil War, he spoke these prophetic words: “At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? . . . If it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us . . . If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

Lincoln was also a student of the Bible. He knew what would happen to a nation that has known God but then rejects Him. He was familiar with passages such as Jeremiah 15:6-7 and feared the consequences that might fall on such a nation:

“‘You have abandoned me and turned your back on me,’ says the Lord. ‘Therefore, I will raise my fist to destroy you. I am tired of always giving you another chance . . . I will destroy my own people, because they refuse to change their evil ways . . .

I will cause anguish and terror to come upon them suddenly’” (New Living Translation).

Has the nation rejected God?

We need only look at America’s popular culture and entertainment to see how far the nation has drifted from God. The nation’s movies and television are filled with sex and violence. Much of its most popular music is obscenity-drenched filth. Pornography is a multibillion-dollar industry. Child pornography and sex trafficking are huge and growing problems.

How did the nation get to this point?

We can trace the nation’s moral and spiritual decline through a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions in recent decades. Two decisions in the early 1960s removed prayer and Bible reading from public schools. For more than 300 years children were encouraged to pray and read the Bible in school, but now God was expelled from public schools and, with subsequent decisions, was largely removed from public life. The nation was set on a path for which the evil fruit is now plain to see.

A decade later, the Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion. Since then, between 60 and 70 million innocent unborn children have been chemically poisoned, ripped apart in their mothers’ wombs or killed in other horrifying ways. A nation that believes it is acceptable to murder a child in the womb, even up to full term, has shown that it is willing to approve all sorts of abhorrent behavior—even what God in His Word calls an abomination.

In 2015 the Court legalized homosexual marriage. In a powerful dissent from the decision, Justice Samuel Alito gave this chilling warning: “Today’s decision . . . will be used to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy . . . [It] will be exploited by those who are determined to stamp out every vestige of dissent . . . Those who cling to old beliefs . . . will risk being labeled as bigots and treated as such by governments, employers, and schools . . . By imposing its own views on the entire country, the [court] majority facilitates the marginalization of the many Americans who have traditional ideas.”

Justice Alito’s words proved to be prophetic. Individuals and organizations that stand up for biblical values—as we do in Beyond Today magazine and television—are branded as bigots, haters, homophobes and far worse. In today’s “cancel culture,” dissenting views such as ours are routinely silenced. And it will only get worse. Bible prophecy tells us that at some point our voice will be silenced too (Amos 8:11-12).

Only a few months ago the Supreme Court redefined “sex” to mean a person can be whatever sex he or she claims to be—meaning men can claim to be women, and women can claim to be men. Thus “men” can now get pregnant, give birth and nurse children and “women” can impregnate their partners (see “The Supreme Court: Turning the World Upside Down” in our September-October 2020 issue).

In just over half a century these decisions by the nation’s highest human court have solidified in American life a defiance of God and His Word. But there is a higher court, and Romans 1:18 gives us its verdict: “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.”

America has become spiritually blind, and each step farther down this path leads to only more darkness and confusion. Today America’s news media, entertainment, pop culture and social media empires are all dominated by the same anti-God, anti-Bible thinking.

Our educational systems are similarly dominated by a mindset rooted in the atheistic theory of evolution, ingraining it in students’ minds as if it were proven fact. So when we teach our children that they’re nothing more than animals, why should we be surprised when, as we see commonly in the news, they behave like animals?

America at a dangerous crossroads

America is on a highly dangerous trajectory. And Americans know it. The anxiety is evident—not just due to the months-long worry over Covid-19, but also over the direction of the nation and people’s own personal safety.

Over the first six months of 2020, Americans bought a record 10.3 million firearms—and that’s in addition to the nearly 400 million that were already owned. America now has more firearms than people! And guns and ammunition are in extremely short supply because citizens are buying up nearly anything that’s available.

And that should come as no surprise. Earlier in the year many city jails were virtually emptied of prisoners to reduce the spread of Covid-19, resulting in immediate crime waves. After some 600 riots in more than 200 cities in which thousands of incidents of arson and looting took place, it’s understandable that citizens are worried.

If that weren’t bad enough, those arrested in recent riots have often been released without charges or without bond, allowing them to continue their criminal behavior. Add to that the fact that more than a dozen cities have slashed police department budgets and/or cut the number of officers, and in many cities government officials have publicly supported protesters over law enforcement!

In a late August interview, Democratic party vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris said of the ongoing protests: “This is a movement . . . They’re not going to stop, and everyone beware . . . because they’re not going to stop before election day in November and they’re not going to stop after election day . . . They’re not going to let up and they should not,and we should not.”

Also in late August, she urged people to donate funds to an organization helping jailed rioters (and others charged with criminal activity) with legal help and bond to get out of jail. The organization took in $35 million. More than a dozen Joe Biden presidential campaign staffers donated money to the same group.

A house divided cannot stand

Shortly before he was elected president, Abraham Lincoln quoted Matthew 12:25: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” It wasn’t long before the divided nation plunged into a devastating civil war in which hundreds of thousands died.

Today America is again deeply divided. It stands at a crucial crossroads. Some see national repentance and a return to strong biblical values as the only hope for the nation’s future. Others desire a continuing radical shift from those values and embrace a future in which God and the Bible are cast away as in the Supreme Court examples mentioned above.

Which way the nation will choose to go is anyone’s guess at the moment. Either way, it will not be pretty.

In any event, God tells us what we need to do as a nation and as individuals: “If My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land” (2 Chronicles 7:14). And our nation desperately needs healing!

To each person He says: “Seek the Lord while He may be found, call upon Him while He is near. Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the Lord, and He will have mercy on him; and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon” (Isaiah 55:6-7).

God has not changed (Malachi 3:6). He does not want to see people suffer and die from continuing in their sinful ways and rejection of Him. He urges each of us—including you personally—to “choose life” (Deuteronomy 30:19) rather than the ways that lead to death and destruction. May you choose rightly!

 

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The Destructive Black Lives Matter Agenda

What is the agenda of Black Lives Matter and those who, knowingly or unknowingly, are helping carry out its purposes? We don’t have to guess; it’s plain from the chants of its adherents, such as those presented in our main article here. And there’s more to help us clue in to what the group is all about.

The three female Black Lives Matter (BLM) cofounders include a community organizer and activist, a homosexual civil rights activist who is married to a transgender community activist, and another homosexual activist who is married to a Canadian Black Lives Matter cofounder and homosexual activist who considers herself neither male nor female. (If you think this is confusing, it is—I had to write this paragraph multiple times to try to make the senseless make sense.)

The organization’s agenda, which flows from the ideology and lifestyles of its founders, is also clear from statements on the BlackLivesMatter.com website. Conspicuously missing from the website is any mention of abortion, which takes more than 300,000 black American lives every year—more than cancer, heart disease, diabetes, accidents and HIV combined. Also notably missing is mention of black-on-black violence; FBI statistics show that of the thousands of black victims of homicide every year, 9 out of 10 are killed by other blacks—but apparently these black lives don’t matter enough to warrant mention.

Key aims of the Black Lives Matter movement found on its website include (if they haven’t been scrubbed from the site to hide their intentions):

• “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure”—i.e., they want to abolish the biblical model of a husband and wife bearing and parenting their children in the way that has been the norm in civilized cultures for millennia (see Genesis 2:24; Matthew 19:5; Mark 10:7; Ephesians 5:31).

• “We foster a queer affirming network”—i.e., they support normalization and promotion of homosexual relationships, which are repeatedly condemned in the Bible (see Leviticus 18:22; 20:13; 1 Corinthians 6:9-10).

• “We . . . do the work required to dismantle cisgender privilege and uplift Black trans folk”—i.e., they deny the biblical truth that God created human beings “male and female” (see Genesis 1:27; 5:2; Matthew 19:4; Mark 10:6) and want to do away with male and female identities, promoting transgenderism and gender confusion as normal.

The BLM cofounders boast of their Marxist ideology and training. In a 2015 interview, one of the cofounders responded that they “are trained organizers” who “do have an ideological frame.” She went on to state: “We are trained Marxists. We are super versed on ideological theories and I think that what we really try to do is build a movement that could be utilized by many, many black folk” (emphasis added throughout).

The organization’s website also states: “We call for a national defunding of police” and “This is the revolution. Change is coming.” Millions of dollars of donations, largely from major corporations, have poured into the organization over recent months that will help fund these goals.

While most of the problems in the black community—poverty, crime, substance abuse, etc.—can be traced to the breakdown of the traditional family structure, with an absence of fathers in the home, a stated goal of the Black Lives Matter movement is, as was noted above, to “disrupt” that same family structure, thereby worsening the problems!

Some will read these statements above and accuse us at Beyond Today of being racist. Let me be perfectly clear: The Bible nowhere condones or approves racism. Racism is an evil and abhorrent result of mankind’s corrupt inclinations and rebellion against the God who made all human beings in His image and “desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4).

The apostle Paul tells us that “you are all one in Christ Jesus” and that neither race, status or gender should divide us (Galatians 3:28). Accordingly, the United Church of God, publisher of Beyond Today magazine, has thousands of members and ministers of all races scattered across all of the inhabited continents.

God “looks at the heart” of a person (1 Samuel 16:7), not the color of one’s skin. Jesus Christ gave His life for every human being (2 Corinthians 5:15).

The desire to eradicate racism is an admirable one—a desire we should all share. But supporting a radical, destructive Marxist revolutionary movement whose listed goals defy many clearly stated biblical laws and principles sets one in opposition to God Himself—a very dangerous position.

This is the biblical perspective each of us needs to understand if we are to grasp what is really taking place here and why.