Appendix 3

Secular Chronology Confirmation

How current trends corroborate the Bible’s revealed timeline

WORLD DEMOGRAPHICS

This world is not the same place it was even a hundred years ago. We are far more crowded, far more likely to live in cities than in rural settings, and far more dependent on things that come from somewhere else. Generally speaking, we are far better informed (or at least we can be) but we seem to show less wisdom and common sense in our everyday decisions than our forebears did. We are far less likely to grow up in traditional two parent households (and when I say “traditional,” I mean what was normal and customary for the past six thousand years, no matter what culture you lived in). Despite quantum leaps in medical science that have greatly reduced the incidence of infant mortality, a baby is far less likely than ever before to be allowed by its mother to draw breath at all. Today we are less moral but more mobile than our great grandparents ever were. We are less healthy, but more health conscious. We are less grounded and more gullible: there has never been a generation with more opportunities for learning, yet with such a shallow perception of how our world works.

In short, how we live has changed dramatically over the past century, no matter where that is. And the pace of that change is increasing exponentially. How long can this trend continue? Consider these factors:  

Explosive Population Growth.

It makes for the classic “hockey-stick” graph: the world’s human population remained relatively constant, at about a quarter-billion souls, from perhaps 500 B.C. until the middle ages, at which point it began creeping slowly upwards. We didn’t hit our first billion until 1804. Then the world’s population doubled to two billion in only 123 years, in 1927. The three billion mark was hit in 1961; four billion in 1974; five billion in 1987; six billion in 1999; and seven billion in 2011. In roughly rounded terms, for the past half century the earth has been adding a billion people every twelve years.

So at the current rate of acceleration in population growth, by the time we reach our hypothetical “target date” of 2033, the earth will host about nine billion people—unless, of course, something happens in the meantime to change the picture (something Biblical prophecy blatantly predicts). Can a world that’s struggling to feed its seven (+) billion present inhabitants cope with the nine billion we can be expected to have before today’s toddlers are old enough to procreate? The answer is pretty obvious. Left to its own devices, the earth will eventually prove to be unequal to the task of providing for its top species (never mind the lower orders).

Christians, of course, can rest (as always) in Yahweh’s provision—knowing that He is capable and willing to solve any problem, if only we’ll trust Him. (The earth could easily support two or three times that population, you understand, if the right amount of fresh water were available in the right places—something Yahweh could do with a yawn and a shrug, but won’t as long as the human race is in rebellion against Him. I’ll discuss the “water” factor a bit later.) Muslims have a different “solution” for overpopulation in mind (as we shall soon see), involving the murder of everyone on the planet except for them—something they call “peace.” (That’s pretty ironic, considering the fact that Muslims have always been far more lethal to each other than they’ve been to us “infidels.”)

Atheistic secular humanists, when they’re being candid, also voice unspeakable opinions on how the earth’s population bomb should be defused. An article that appeared on Prison Planet’s website on April 3, 2006 reported: “A top scientist gave a speech to the Texas Academy of Science last month in which he advocated the need to exterminate 90% of the population through the airborne ebola virus. Dr. Eric R. Pianka’s chilling comments, and their enthusiastic reception, again underscore the elite’s agenda to enact horrifying measures of population control…. Saying the public was not ready to hear the information presented, Pianka began by exclaiming, ‘We’re no better than bacteria!’ as he jumped into a doomsday malthusian rant about overpopulation destroying the earth. Standing in front of a slide of human skulls, Pianka gleefully advocated airborne ebola as his preferred method of exterminating the necessary 90% of humans, choosing it over AIDS because of its faster kill period. Ebola victims suffer the most tortuous deaths imaginable as the virus kills by liquefying the internal organs. The body literally dissolves as the victim writhes in pain bleeding from every orifice.” Lovely.

Dr. Pianka may be insane, but he’s by no means alone. The movers and shakers of the global progressive elite are all in lock step with the goal of genocide in the name of “saving the human race.” David Rockefeller’s opinion sets the tone: “The negative impact of population growth on all of our planetary ecosystems is becoming appallingly evident.” I would counter this with the assertion that twenty people who refuse to honor the God who made them is twenty too many. In other words, it’s not the number of people; it’s the quality of life they live—the degree of harmony and synchronicity they share with Yahweh. Just my opinion, of course.

John P. Holdren, “science” adviser to Barack Obama, opined, “The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births.” Never mind “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Never mind the fact that the U.S. birth rate has already fallen below the “replacement” factor of 2.1 children. Never mind that the issue that put the progressive elites into power, “women’s reproductive rights,” includes (even by the most liberal of standards) not only the “right” to kill your children in the womb, but also the right to bear them when you finally think it’s convenient. With the liberals in charge of a program like this, guess who would be the first to be denied permission to reproduce? Christians, Jews, Conservatives, home-schoolers, gun owners…

Entertainer Bill Maher (who actually thinks he’s funny) is not joking when he says, “I’m pro-choice, I’m for assisted suicide, I’m for regular suicide, I’m for whatever gets the freeway moving—that’s what I’m for. It’s too crowded; the planet is too crowded and we need to promote death.” Really, Bill? How’s about we begin with you? Your hypocrisy is showing.

CNN Founder Ted Turner has no idea how ironic his dream for a better world is. He thinks, “A total world population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.” Why is this ironic? Because (if you’ll recall) that was the rough number I estimated would enter the Millennial Kingdom of Yahshua the Messiah—after the man-made terrors of the Tribulation and the demonic aftermath. (The “wrath of God” in practice consists mostly of His ceasing to restrain people from killing each other.) One “flaw” in Turner’s plan: there won’t be a single atheistic secular humanist among them.

Tell me again—Why do they call these people “humanists”? They don’t seem to like humans very much.

As with the Islamists, the secular humanist solution is to “kill everybody but us.” What both groups are forgetting, of course, is that neither of them is particularly productive: they’re mostly parasites, living off the labors of others—you know: the “suckers” with their “Judeo-Christian work ethic.” Once they’ve killed off the host, the parasites will invariably turn on themselves in cannibalistic rage. You can’t run a master-slave state if you’ve murdered all the slaves.

It should be noted that the Bible’s prophetic scenario, which foresees a similar percentage of population reduction, does not suggest that Christians or Jews—or even God Himself—will be (or should be) responsible for the deaths of the wicked. All Yahweh intends to do is cease restraining mankind from acting on its own self-destructive proclivities, and maybe stop providing His bounty (like water, food, and light) in such magnanimous profusion. He will remove the Christians, sequester the Jews, and let the rest of the world do whatever it wants—for seven years, anyway. As Christ pointed out, if the Tribulation didn’t have a time limit imposed by God’s plan, no flesh would live through it (see Mark 13:20). In a pattern we see recurring throughout scripture, God won’t kill anyone personally until they’ve invaded the Promised Land with genocide on their minds.

The bottom line, then, is that at the present pace, the earth’s population will grow to an unsustainable level by the fourth decade of the twenty-first century. Ironically, it has taken us six thousand years to comply with Yahweh’s very first commandment to mankind: “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it.” (Genesis 1:28) But if God’s word can be trusted (and I think you know where I stand on that issue), the ultimate “filling of the earth” will be of an entirely different sort: “For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of Yahweh, as the waters cover the sea.” (Habakkuk 2:14)

Shifts in Religious Demographics

A hundred years ago, you could plausibly label the nations of the world by their dominant religions. You could say, these nations are Christians (at least nominally), these are Muslims, these are Hindus, and these are Buddhists or Sikhs. Birds of a feather, as they say, flocked together. But today, several factors have converged to change that picture dramatically. As we have noted, the world’s population has more than tripled in the past century, creating pressures that were previously unknown. Add to that the ramifications of Daniel’s prophecy of the time of the end, “Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase” (Daniel 12:4), and we see multitudes of people emigrating to lands foreign to them, seeking refuge from the grinding poverty and political tyranny their native cultures have imposed upon them.

But unlike the Christian pilgrims of old, these refugees aren’t (for the most part) fleeing from religious oppression. Rather, their plan is to bring the religious oppression of their native lands with them, transplanting it into their new homes. They don’t seem to realize that the hard lives and lack of opportunity they wish to leave behind are the direct result of their belief in gods other than Yahweh. By far the most statistically significant pilgrim population over the past few decades, of course, is composed of Muslims fleeing Islamic Middle Eastern and North African regimes in search of prosperity and promise. And the countries to which they are fleeing (mostly in Europe and America) invariably have long histories as “Christian” nations (in name if not in fact).

What’s wrong with this picture? First (and most obvious), if the immigrants don’t leave Islam behind, they are doomed to the same sort of slavery (though perhaps with better scenery) that they were trying to leave in the first place. To the man with Limburger cheese in his moustache, the whole world stinks. Or to put in the Torah’s terms, you can’t cure your leprosy by leaving the leper colony and moving back into the city—that will only spread your disease to others, doing you no good. I am reminded of Yahshua’s illustration (Matthew 12:43-45) of a demon leaving a man, seeking rest and finding none. The devil then goes back to his original host, but takes seven spirits with him who are even more evil than himself, so the man ends up worse off than ever. The point is that you can take the man out of the mosque, but if you don’t also take the mosque out of the man, he will carry his putrid religion with him wherever he goes, spreading it like a cancer. But it’s actually even worse than that. In the long run, it will do no good to turn one’s back on Islam if Yahweh’s word isn’t embraced in its place. Merely substituting one dead religion for another isn’t really progress.

Second, if the Muslim migrants were looking to settle in a society that God had blessed, they’re about two generations late (in the case of America) or two or three hundred years (in the case of Europe). I realize that they don’t know Yahweh as God, but the reason they want to come to America or Europe (even if they don’t know why), is that this is where Christianity once took root—where the true and living God once blessed the faith of its inhabitants, however flawed it was. The Muslim pilgrims may hate Christianity, but they kind of like the things that go with it, the things that grow out of it—freedom, justice, civility, honor, opportunity, and even prosperity. Civilization, however, is like an aircraft carrier—it doesn’t stop on a dime. Europe hasn’t had much of a relationship with the God of the Bible for half a millennium. Even though Great Britain and Scandinavia dragged their heels in the apostasy department, they too are pretty much a lost cause today. America is what you might call “bipolar” when it comes to rebellion against God: although the nation as a whole has abandoned Him, there remains a sizable minority here who still revere Him and keep His word. (The “hot spots” of faith these days seem to be in Asia and South America, where pockets of Christianity are flourishing today much as it did in the early church—i.e., amid persecution and trial.) Anyway, my point was that the residual evidence of God’s blessing on America, and even Europe, didn’t evaporate the moment our country turned its back on Him. And that blessing (though not its Source) is something Muslims covet with every fiber of their being.

So when Muslims (and others) flee the cultural cesspools in which they were born and emigrate to post-Christian countries, it’s like jumping off a sinking ship into a sinking lifeboat. The long term prospect is identical. The problem isn’t only a steadily increasing population of Muslims (in both relative and absolute terms) in formerly Christianized nations. It’s the abandonment of the God of Christianity by the vast majority of those nations’ citizens—citizens whose great-grandparents would have at least feigned Christianity.

I’m not saying that religious pretense is necessarily to be preferred to a secularized society. Yahshua warned us that we could only enter into Yahweh’s presence through the “narrow gate,” and that the broad way—even if it looks “religious”—leads to destruction. But in a homogenous, nominally Christian culture such as the one in which I grew up in America in the 1950s, one could at least pursue the things of God without government harassment if he wished to do so. In this country, however, freedom of religion (one of our founding principles) has been subtly twisted into freedom from religion. Separation of church and state (an excellent idea, one the Europeans never embraced) has been reinterpreted to mean that the church and the state must be adversaries. And that, of course, makes the whole perverse premise a self-fulfilling prophecy.

At least, that’s what the “separation of church and state” issue looks like from the outside. The truth is somewhat more sinister. Church and state—in both America and Europe, and actually, throughout half the world—are now in lock step with each other—but the “church” in this context is no longer a religious organization based on the life and mission of the Son of God. Now, the “church” is atheistic secular humanism—still a religion in every sense of the word. Their “god” is Satan (masquerading as blind chance); their “priests” are left-wing politicians, scientists, academics and entertainers; their “heaven” is the promise of power, sex, and money; their “offerings” are the taxes they impose upon the populace; and their “parishioners” are the fools—useful idiots and fellow travelers—who buy into their lies. (The “heretics” in this twisted system are now the Christians!) This shift in religious demographics has gone on under our very noses, and despite the warnings from scripture, we either didn’t see it coming or were powerless to stop it. It’s small comfort that the prophets and apostles warned us of the character of these evil days.

Furthermore, although the demographic percentages haven’t changed much, the characters of the world’s two largest religions—Islam and Catholicism, together comprising almost half of humanity—have undergone subtle but significant shifts in the past century or so. With Catholicism, it’s increasing levels of compromise—usually disguised as ecumenicism today. First it was the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that characterized their dealings with Nazi Germany. Since then, the Roman Catholic church (perhaps in a desperate effort to reclaim some of its bygone influence) has reached out to Orthodox churches and liberal Protestants, and (going beyond the boundaries of classical ecumenicism) has engaged in what they call “interfaith dialogue” with other faiths, such as Hinduism and Islam. The famous photo of Pope John Paul II kissing the Qur’an sort of says it all.

With Islam, the shift in character has been away from mindless (and relatively benign) traditional religiosity, and toward fundamental compliance with their scriptures—the Qur’an, Hadith, and Sunnah—which are based almost entirely on what Muhammad did, said, and thought. This is bad news for the rest of the world, because those scriptures teach that Islam is to be imposed upon the whole earth, by stealth or by sword—whatever it takes. The recent trend toward Islamic terrorism is the direct result of Muslims paying more attention to their scriptures. Jihad is not “spiritual struggle,” as they’d have you believe, but (as the Noble Qur’an notes on Surah 2:190), “Jihad is holy fighting in Allah’s Cause with full force of numbers and weaponry. It is given the utmost importance in Islam and is one of its pillars. By Jihad Islam is established, Allah’s Word is made superior, and Islam is propagated…. Jihad is an obligatory duty in Islam on every Muslim. He who…does not fulfill this duty, dies as a hypocrite.” Oh, and by the way, these Muslim “hypocrites” are said to be consigned to the hottest fires of hell—their fate is said to be even worse than Jews’ or Christians’. If you really believe this stuff, flying airplanes into tall buildings makes perfect sense.

What all of these things have in common is man’s tendency to concentrate power—elevating those few who have it, the elite, above the masses who don’t. The demographic shifts I’ve mentioned are actually part of something even larger and more pervasive. The Bible has a code word for it: it’s called Babylon, and it manifests itself three ways: in religion (with academia), in politics or government (including military matters), and in finance and commerce. In these three “flavors” of “Babylon bouillabaisse” (all of which smell mighty fishy) we can now see a decided trend developing toward the accumulation of power and influence the hands of a few powerful individuals. If the trend continues at its present pace, by the fourth decade of the twenty-first century all of the earth’s power, wealth, and worship could be concentrated in the hands of a single all-powerful individual—just as the Bible predicts: “And authority was given him over every tribe, tongue, and nation. All who dwell on the earth will worship him, whose names have not been written in the Book of Life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.” (Revelation 13:7-8)  

Populations in Poverty

“Poverty” is largely a matter of perception. In some cultures, a man who owns three pigs is considered wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice, while in America, a family of four with an annual income of $23,000 (a number that increases every year) is said to be “living in poverty,” even if they’ve got a roof over their heads, running water, food, transportation, cell phones, and cable TV. Coming in “below the threshold” makes folks eligible for government handouts like welfare, food stamps, free school lunches, medical care, and free cell phones—all things that raise their effective income. So (while genuine poverty exists) it is not surprising that in America and like-minded quasi-socialist nations, some people have developed “gaming the system” into a fine art—and a lifestyle. Poverty can pay off handsomely if you have no self-respect and you believe that the world owes you a living. But as Margaret Thatcher once famously remarked, “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”

The sad fact is, we actually reached that point some time ago. The “developed” world is so far beyond “broke,” there’s nothing but momentum and ignorance holding the whole economic system together. We (the human race) are like a man who has jumped off a tall building but hasn’t yet hit the sidewalk. We’re “dead,” even though we’re technically still alive. It’s only a matter of time and natural forces (gravity, momentum, terminal velocity, wind resistance…) before we’re a puddle of goo on the pavement.

You may be saying, Are you nuts? The Dow is near its highest level in history; there are poor folks, to be sure, but there are also rich people, making more money than ever before. Yes, if you’re lucky enough to be employed (don’t believe the published figures, by the way—they’re manipulated for political expediency), you may be making more dollars than you used to. But you’re forgetting about the hidden tax called inflation that’s built into the world’s monetary system. If it’s not in double digits (as it was during the Jimmy Carter era) inflation is taken in stride by most people, even though it eats into their resources like termites eating a house. Over time, the cumulative effects can be devastating. A hundred dollars today has the purchasing power that $3.48 had back in 1900. When I was a young man, the maxim was that if you “earned your age” (for example, if you made $30,000 a year as a thirty year old), you were rich and successful. Today, those figures are flirting with the poverty line.

Inflation is no accident, no fluke. It is the natural—planned—result of monetary policy, not just in the United States, but worldwide. It all has to do with the money supply—something that is controlled by rich bankers in smoke filled rooms—not by governments, though they do share incestuous relationships with them. These “central banks,” as they’re known, control the supply of currency in circulation. They have discovered that they can control the rate of inflation (adjusting it to politically survivable levels) by controlling the interest rates at which they loan money to their respective nations or confederacies (such as the European Union), and by increasing (or theoretically, decreasing) the supply of currency in circulation—a.k.a., printing money. (Lately, they’ve been calling it “Quantitative Easing”—which is some sort of sick joke, like calling the stunningly expensive Obamacare fiasco the “Affordable Care Act.”) Market forces no longer have anything to do with it.

So where do the central banks get the money to loan to their governments? They don’t. Wealth is no longer based on tangible assets (like precious metals) held in trust. “Money” is now created in tandem with debt. (I’ll discuss the looming debt crisis under a separate heading.) The idea is, when you pay off the debt, the money supply shrinks in proportion. The problem is, in the real world, the debts are never paid off. If politicians did that, the people whose votes they’ve bought with welfare boondoggles and pork-barrel spending would tar and feather them and run them out of town on a rail. How dare you take away my free lunch! The trick for politicians, then (who’s only goal is to get in power and stay there) is to create the illusion of prosperity, equality, and progress, even though we’re actually losing ground. They do this by spending every dollar (or euro, yuan, peso, pound, or ruble…) they can tax or borrow in the hope that the majority never catches on to the fact they have, in fact, been sold into slavery: a prison of poverty from which there is no escape (short of a total reboot of civilization—something the Bible predicts, in so many words).

The trend—one that is accelerating as I write these words—is toward the creation of a civilization in which the central government seizes the lion’s share of the available resources and uses it to “take care” of its citizens’ every need—education, health care, child rearing, transportation, food supplies, energy, housing, etc. If this sounds familiar, it should: the Soviets tried it for seventy years, and it was a dismal failure at every turn: millions died for no other reason than “central planning.” The current term used to describe this philosophy is the “nanny state,” the idea being that the citizen-sheeple are too stupid to know what’s really good for them; they’re like small children—they need to be protected, even from themselves. These “children,” of course, are supposed to be grateful to be “cared for” like this from cradle (should they be lucky enough to elude the abortionist’s cranioclast) to the grave. What the politicians are hoping we never realize is that children own nothing: everything belongs to their “parents,” who can take it away in a heartbeat if they step out of line. It works out okay in families, for the most part—where parents naturally love their children and are willing to sacrifice themselves for their kids’ well-being. But with governments, the “kids” are only there to mow the lawn, walk the dog, and take out the trash. Love never enters into it.

What happens when the socialists “run out of other people’s money?” Although that train has already left the station, the day of reckoning (when everyone at last realizes what has been done to them) is fast approaching. If history is any indication, those in power will once again fire up the printing presses, printing even more money, food stamps, vouchers, and freebies—all of which will become worth less (and eventually worthless) as a result. One example: Europe, Britain, and Canada have been laboring under state-run socialized health care systems for decades (something with which the Americans are only now beginning to deal). The inevitable, predictable, and historical result? Yes, health care is “free.” But it’s also unavailable. You can’t get the operation or the care you need in a timely fashion—at any price; the practice of medicine is no longer run by doctors, or even insurance adjusters, but by bureaucrats—politically motivated bean counters. Eventually, people stop studying for careers in the health care profession, because there’s really no point to racking up hundreds of thousands in student loans if you can’t earn a decent living as a doctor. In the end, it doesn’t matter how much money (or what kind of insurance) you’ve got: as far as your health is concerned, you’ll end up living in what amounts to dire poverty, because there’s no one available to treat what ails you.

And that’s just one area of your complex life. Name a profession, name an endeavor, and the story is the same: once the government (or the people behind it) have declared themselves to be “god” (a.k.a. your “nanny”) then personal poverty (in one form or another) will inevitably result. We’ve seen it in medicine, labor, energy, education, food production, and the list goes on: what used to set folks back three dollars and forty-eight cents now costs you a hundred bucks. If the trend continues at its present pace, the world’s populace will awaken to the reality of their chains by roughly the fourth decade of the twenty-first century—and the resulting upheaval will testify to the truth of the warning of the prophet Habakkuk: “Will not all these take up a proverb against him, and a taunting riddle against him, and say, ‘Woe to him who increases what is not his—how long? And to him who loads himself with many pledges’? Will not your creditors rise up suddenly? Will they not awaken who oppress you? And you will become their booty.” (Habakkuk 2:6-7) 

Abortion and the Demise of the Family

The poverty issue comes into sharp focus when we view it through the lens of family structure. Although “stealth” poverty affects us all, real, tangible hardship is felt far more deeply when we abandon the “traditional” family—two married parents (of opposite sexes—I can’t believe I had to add that), living under the same roof raising their children together. That’s not a politically conservative “talking point.” The statistics tell the tale. These numbers are for the U.S., but they’re similar throughout the developed world. A recent survey reveals that 6.2% of all families live in poverty. That’s doubtless a little higher than it has to be, but as Yahshua reminded us, “The poor you will always have with you.” Compare that, however, to the rate for single-parent households (either moms or dads): the poverty rate was 27.3 percent—over four times as high; and for single-mother households, the poverty rate was a whopping 29.9%. Policymic.com reports: “Children in non-intact families face a higher risk of poverty throughout childhood. By age six, 68 percent of children in non-married households had experienced at least one year of poverty, compared to 12 percent of children in married households…. By age seventeen, 81 percent of children in non-married households had experienced at least one year of poverty compared to 22 percent of children in married households.” In other words, kids are four to five times more likely to live in poverty if their parents aren’t married to each other and living together.

“Among children whose parents divorce, those with mothers who remarry are least likely to be poor. There was a 66 percent reduction in poverty among children whose divorced single mothers remarried and a 40 percent reduction in poverty among children whose mothers cohabited following a divorce.” So having a man around the house is better than nothing, but not nearly as good as having a committed, devoted man—a husband. (The etymology of the word comes as no particular surprise: it’s derived from “house-band.”) “The poverty rate of children whose divorced mothers remarried was 9.4 percent, while the poverty rate of children whose divorced mothers cohabited was 28.8 percent. The poverty rate of children whose divorced mothers remained single was 42.4 percent.”

Furthermore, “Marriage reduces the risk of poverty for both employed and unemployed single mothers. The likelihood of single, unemployed mothers being in poverty dropped from 100 percent to 35 percent if they marry the father of their children.” Policymic’s point was that the country’s tax structure should be revamped to eliminate the “marriage penalty” that puts married couples at a financial disadvantage. While I’d have to agree, there are far larger, more fundamental issues to solve here.

The worldwide demographic shift away from marriage has been going on for the past half century. Half of all marriages end in divorce. Couples are more and more likely to cohabit before (or in place of) getting married. And the average age of people getting married is creeping steadily upward: today, half of men don’t marry until at least about age 29, and half of women don’t marry before they’re about age 27.

And what about children? Forty-eight percent of “first children” are born out of wedlock, and although the numbers vary by nation, the percentages of births to unmarried women have doubled or tripled over the past half century. Wikipedia reports that “In 2009, 41% of children born in the United States were born to unmarried mothers (up from 5% a half century ago).” Let that statistic sink in: that’s an increase of over eight hundred percent in illegitimate births over the past fifty years.

The numbers are even worse among minorities: “…That includes 73% of non-Hispanic black children, 53% of Hispanic children, and 29% of non-Hispanic white children…. Nearly 40 percent of American infants born in 2007 were born to an unwed mother….” Remarkably, “Latin America has the highest rates of non-marital childbearing in the world (55–74% of all children in this region are born to unmarried parents). In most countries in this traditionally Catholic region, children born outside marriage are now the norm.” The Roman Catholic church has a strict policy of “fidelity, chastity, or abstinence,” depending upon one’s marital status—and divorce is an anathema to them (all of which I agree with). So the statistical disconnect between Catholic dogma and Catholic culture speaks volumes about the Church’s lack of credibility in its own backyard.

In the past, illegitimacy was seen as an obstacle to overcome. People conceived out of wedlock were often “driven to excel in their endeavors, for good or ill, by a desire to overcome the social stigma and disadvantage that attached to it,” hence the exploits of such eccentric “luminaries” as T.E. Lawrence (a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia), Steve Jobs (of Apple Computer fame), John Wilkes Booth (the assassin of Abraham Lincoln), and Barack H. Obama (the 44th president of the United States, who was so insecure, his profligate spending added more to the national debt in his first four years than all of the presidents who preceded him put together).

What happens, then, when illegitimacy becomes the norm? What happens when half of an entire generation still has the economic disadvantages, but the social stigma is now personal and internal, not public and cultural—when half the people you meet have this nagging feeling in the backs of their minds that “my mother was a slut and my father was a spineless weasel—I’m on my own.” Is it really so shocking that the traditional morals and standards that used to hold society together are not particularly high on their list of priorities? And is it really so surprising that the concept of God as a “heavenly Father” has no positive connotation or association with half the people you meet? (This, of course, us just as Satan planned it.)

Nor it is not terribly surprising that four out of ten people in America, the last bastion of cultural Christianity on earth, now believe that marriage is obsolete. If the mainstream media were to be believed, the only people who really like the idea of marriage any more are homosexuals.

Sigh.

As a man who has been happily married for forty-five years, who with my wife raised eleven children, and who has enjoyed the providence of God my entire life, none of these statistics make any sense whatsoever. I have a sneaking suspicion that the whole thing stems from the advent of the birth-control pill in the 1960s, paired with the realization that mindless religious tradition (in lieu of real Christian faith) doesn’t have anything to offer.

Having come of age in the ’60s myself, and having been part of that generation (as an observer, not a willing participant), I know how the thought progression went: (1) We’re young and in love, and we want to have sex, but we were afraid of getting pregnant, with all that responsibility. Now that we have the pill, that worry is gone. (2) Gee, now that pregnancy is off the table, so is fidelity. Why restrict my sexual encounters to someone I’d want to spend my whole life with? There are plenty of fish in the sea. (3) Drugs and rock-and-roll seem to go nicely with sexual license, don’t you think? (4) Love? Can’t really remember what that is, dude. But I’m tired of singles bars and one-night stands. I could use a little stability in my life, if only to get a good night’s rest once in a while. (5) The company I work for seems to like established, responsible types—you know, with 2.3 kids and a dog in the backyard. Let’s get married. (6a) I don’t really love you anymore—truth is, I’m not sure I ever did. I’m sick to death of all your “issues.” And the kids are more or less grown up now. I want a divorce. Or, (6b) after all this time, I’ve gotten used to you and all your quirks, and I don’t want to be alone, not at my age. I may not love you, but at least we’re finally financially secure, so let’s stay married.

Pretty cynical, I know. It’s a sad commentary on half my generation and the ones that followed. My ideal of how “traditional marriage” ought to progress sounds downright radical in comparison: (1) We’re young and in love, so with our parents’ blessing and support, we’re going to get married now—committed to each other to face life as we find it together, come what may, for richer or poorer, ’til death do us part. (2) We don’t have money to buy each other fancy gifts, but you’re all I want anyway. (3) Getting to “know” you (in the Biblical sense) is more fun than I ever could have imagined. I wouldn’t trade your love for anything. (4) We’ve got a baby on the way? Praise God! (5) Thank you, Father Yahweh, for this new life. We dedicate ourselves to raising this child in Your love, just as You have loved and provided for us. (6) Again? Could our life get any sweeter? (7) The last of the kids just moved out. I pray that they study hard, honor God, and make wise choices. As for me, the best choice I ever made was loving you. (Well, maybe the second best—the first being the choice to love the One from whom love comes in the first place: Yahweh.)

So, is marriage obsolete? Not in my book. But it has to be marriage, not merely a partnership of pleasure or convenience. Two-part epoxy won’t hold anything together unless part A reacts chemically with part B—becoming a whole new thing. We need to realize that marriage—one man and one woman living together in a loving, fruitful relationship for their entire adult lives—is a symbol, a metaphor, of what God wanted us to know about our potential relationship with Him. The essence of marriage is not its legality, the form of the wedding ceremony, or even its social/cultural construct. It is, rather, the unshakable commitment it promises, mirroring God’s commitment to us if only we’ll say “yes, I do” to Him. Our love toward each other in marriage (as it is to our God) is to be unconditional and unreserved. As I put it in a love song I wrote to my wife a long time ago (somewhat tongue in cheek), “…and I will love my own sweet wife / as long as God loves me.” That’s my idea of “unconditional.”

And what was that about being “fruitful?” It occurs to me that Satan is schizophrenic: on the one hand, he encourages us to be loose and lascivious in our sexual morality; on the other, he tries to portray sex as something dirty and forbidden, so we’ll feel ashamed and guilty about it. (He plays Islam like a fiddle in that regard.) But how does Yahweh (the One who invented sexual reproduction) feel about it? His initial commandment, the very first thing He told Adam and Eve to do (as far as we’re told) was, “Be fruitful and multiply: fill the earth.” (Genesis 1:28) In other words, “Go have sex, you two—lots of it.”

Yahweh had created Adam and Eve to be perfect mates for each other. The depth of Adam’s dedication to Eve sometimes escapes us. It seems to me that Adam’s “fall” into sin may not have been exactly as we picture it. A careful reading of Genesis 3 reveals that the core of Adam’s sin wasn’t so much eating the fruit of the no-no tree as it was letting his affection for his wife override his devotion to God. She had been deceived by the serpent; she’d bought into the lie. But Adam ate the fruit with his eyes wide open. As far as he was concerned, Eve was his life—he wasn’t going to let her go anywhere without him, even into sin, even into death. Of course, the first thing he did once he became a sinner was to try to shift the blame for the whole debacle onto his bride. His nature had become corrupt. Ironically, his commitment to Eve in the wake of her disastrous decision made Adam unable to help her. We’ve all done stupid things for love. I think this is where the practice started.  

But I digress. We were talking about marriage and family—fruitfulness, the way Yahweh ordained it, as opposed to the moral anarchy we see permeating society today. This whole article is a study of world demographics, and how the trends point toward a disastrous paradigm shift in the coming decades. The only way the world’s population grows is through sex. As we have seen, Yahweh promotes sex between a man and a woman who are committed in love to each other for life—something defined as “marriage,” a picture of our relationship with Him. Satan apparently likes the idea of sex as well, but only if it can be used as a tool to destroy the relationships of mankind—whom he hates and envies with every fiber of his being. So he promotes sexual contact, but only between people who aren’t married, people who don’t even know each other, or people of the same gender. Adultery, fornication, homosexuality, prostitution, pedophilia, rape, bestiality, necrophilia, and any other perversion he can think of are the devil’s attempts to obfuscate Yahweh’s beautiful symbol.

Sex within marriage, of course, leads to pregnancy, as do some of these Satanic perversions. Pregnancy promises an increase in the population, which, as we have seen, is suddenly growing at an alarming rate—adding a billion souls to the earth’s population every twelve years or so (at the present rate). That is, about 133 million people are born in this world every year, but scores of millions die as well: the net gain (recently, anyway) has been somewhere north of 80 million souls annually. But there is another factor that must be considered if we want to get a firm grasp on the reality of world demographics in these Last Days. That factor is abortion.

The World Health Organization reports that between 40 and 50 million abortions are performed annually. The number is hard to pin down because in places where terminating a pregnancy isn’t legal, the procedure tends to be vastly underreported (and the victims—the aborted children—are in no position to blow the whistle on the perpetrators). As a working statistic, let’s split the difference, and estimate that the number is somewhere in the neighborhood of 45 million abortions per year, worldwide (of which a “mere” 1.3 million are performed in the United States). To put this in perspective, 133 million children are born annually into this world, but there were 178 million pregnancies. That is, one child out of every four is murdered in the womb before he or she can see the light of day.

I’m not God (obviously) but I’ve been given a tiny glimpse into what this might feel like for Him. My wife and I raised eleven children, of whom the last nine were adopted. Several of these kids were disabled to one degree or another—some severely. One of our adopted daughters died at three, and another at ten—both after beating the odds against them for years, living far beyond what their medical prognoses indicated. Then, a month ago (as I write this), a third handicapped daughter passed away from complications of Post-Polio Syndrome and Huntington’s Chorea. She was thirty-eight. So we’ve lost about a quarter of our kids. As sad and as empty as my wife and I feel when we remember our beloved Molly, Jill, and Marianne, we still rejoice that they are now in the presence of God, and will soon be clothed in bodies that actually work the way they’re supposed to. But would I feel the same way if an intruder had broken in and murdered them in their beds, under our very noses? No! There would be an element of anger in my memory that wouldn’t go away until the perpetrator was caught and punished. That has to be the way Yahweh feels when he hears the blood of 45 million innocent children crying out to Him—every single year.

Why? What possible reason could someone give for justifying such unspeakable carnage? How’s this for a little perspective? In the land of Canaan about thirty-five hundred years ago (you know, the only time in history when Yahweh ordered the genocide or exile of an entire indigenous people), Molech worshippers routinely sacrificed their children. They burned them alive by placing them in the red-hot arms of a metal statue of this bloodthirsty Babylonian god (also known as Chemosh, Milcom, Ba’al, Cronus, Saturn, etc.—the name means “king” or “lord”) in hopes of being granted material prosperity—bountiful crops and increased flocks and herds.

Ancient history? Not even a little bit. Today, ninety-three percent of all abortions are performed because (if the parents are to be believed) the child is deemed “inconvenient” in some way—a burden that might negatively impact the lifestyle or prosperity of the mother and/or the father. Thus I would submit to you that there is no appreciable difference (as far as motivation is concerned) between modern abortion practices and bronze age Molech worship. As we’ve seen, approximately 45 million abortions are performed annually worldwide. This means that 40 million children—two thirds of the total horrendous death toll of World War II—are sacrificed every year on the insatiable outstretched arms of the image of Molech. And we wonder why Yahweh is still angry.

A devil’s advocate might argue that 45 million fewer births per year are merely “a good start”—that with the population bomb ticking away (as we saw previously), the whole thing is likely to “blow up in our faces” by the fourth decade of the twenty-first century. If anything (he’d say), more should be done to “decrease the surplus population” (in the immortal words of Ebenezer Scrooge). We’ve already read of Dr. Eric R. Pianka’s insane scheme to wipe out 90% of the earth’s population (presumably not including himself) using the ebola virus.

Mad scientists are one thing; governments with absolute power within their own borders are another. China, the most populous nation on earth, decided back in the 1970s to limit the births of its population to one child per family (this after decades under Mao Tse Tung’s policies designed to increase the Chinese population for strategic purposes). Though riddled with loopholes and exceptions, and unevenly enforced, the Chinese government insists the program has been marvelously effective, lowering the total population by up to 400 million below what it might have been (which sounds suspiciously like our government counting theoretical jobs being “saved or created”—in other words, statistics based solely on wishful thinking and political expediency).

It is not my purpose to pass judgment on the wisdom or efficacy of China’s one-child policy. But I would like to remark on the law of unintended consequences. Sixty years of Communist rule did nothing to change two millennia of ingrained cultural predispositions in China. The fact is, male children are coveted far above females in that society, for males are seen as breadwinners, providers, and (more to the point) the ones who will be responsible for taking care of their parents in their old age. (As in so many cultures historically, girls are expected to marry, thus becoming part of the support structure for the husband’s family, not her own parents.) So what happens when a traditional Chinese couple, knowing they are allowed only one child, discovers their baby is going to be a girl? (With the advent of amniocentesis, fetal gender can be determined as early as eight or nine weeks of gestation.) Abortion—something the Chinese Communist government makes ridiculously easy—immediately springs to mind. Or what if the parents of one child discover that mom is pregnant again? Again, abortion (forced or otherwise) is on the table.

Here are a few statistics to ponder: 55 percent of all women in China have had at least one abortion. As many as half of all abortions in China are due to prenatal sex selection. Since 1971, doctors in China have performed 336 million abortions (many of them forced), have performed 196 million sterilizations (again, mostly forced), and have inserted 403 million intrauterine devices. Is it any wonder that the female suicide rate in China is three times higher than it is for males? (This is an unheard of statistical anomaly.) 56 percent of the world’s female suicides occur in China, which has only 19 percent of the overall population.

So think ahead a bit (something the Chinese have failed to do). For the past couple of generations, China has been doing everything it could (wittingly or unwittingly) to create a severe gender imbalance—a nation with far more males than females. If the trend continues at its present pace, by the fourth decade of the twenty-first century (there’s that timeframe again) they will be faced with the unenviable proposition that half of the men of marriageable age won’t be able to find women to marry (never mind western-style no-commitment cohabitation)—they simply won’t be available. The results? (1) The civilizing, stabilizing influence of family life will be severely curtailed. (2) The population of China will find itself aging, not because seniors are living longer, but because fewer children are being born. And (3) the frustrated, unattached males will turn to professions in which families are seen as hindrances or distractions—notably, war. Suddenly, the sixth trumpet judgment (predicted in Revelation 9:13-21) and the sixth bowl judgment (Revelation 16:12) don’t seem so farfetched, do they?

So the counterintuitive bottom line, for all our cries for “peace and love” is that the human race has become, within the past few decades, the most murderous and most sexually deviant generation ever to have existed on this planet. Men and women refuse to make lifelong commitments to each other, forsaking every component of marriage except for sex. So our population continues to grow, threatening to outstrip our ability to feed ourselves. To compensate, we kill more people (especially in the womb), showing less remorse, than at any time previously in our history. And it’s all because we—the human race—have largely turned our back on the God who made us, forsaking His instructions and His covenant. I no longer pray for peace (except for Zion). I don’t even pray for revival much any more, for the world’s problem in this final generation isn’t apathy or backsliding; it’s rebellion. No, what I pray for now is for Yahweh to separate His people from the world—to make us holy, for He is holy.  

(First published 2013)