Monday Morning Music Ministry

9-11-23

“9-11” will never lose its meaning in America; maybe it will have evocations as long as the world lasts. More than a mere “event,” it is one of those moments in history that people will always associate with where they were, what they were doing, when the news of the terror attacks occurred.

It might not lose its meaning, but will it lose its significance?

My son Ted was an intern at one of the major cable news networks at that time. Its studios are across the Hudson from lower Manhattan, and every day – before 9-11 – he could see the Twin Towers from the station’s parking lot. On that day he put in extra hours, working non-stop on the breaking news, correspondents’ feeds, editing video footage, some of which, featuring falling bodies and splattered corpses and collapsing monoliths, have still never been publicly shown.

I frequently have challenged audiences in some of my speeches if anyone could state, even approximately, the number of victims of terrorism there were on 9-11. Hands go up, and the invariable estimates are around 3,000. And my invariable response is this correction:

No. There were approximately 3,000 victims of murder on 9-11. The victims of terrorism are about 330-million… and still growing.

If there were “silver linings” to the clouds of smoke and dust on 9-11 it was that America was briefly united, even unified, in our response, grief, and resolution. Skeptics worried that clarity, patriotism, and some common purposes would be short-lived.

Of course, the skeptics were right. Many young people responded by volunteering for military service. American adventurism, however, has led to ambiguous results if not Pyrrhic victories. A Patriot Act inherently is flawed, perhaps compromising as many rights as it purports to protect. According to elections, surveys, and streets filled with spilled blood and broken glass, our citizenry is more divided than ever.

The terrorists are following an agenda. But who wrote it?

We are in this state not because of a few hijacked planes on 9-11. There were attacks before; many since; and 9-11 only represented the most palpable and perhaps symbolic of the threats America faces. In fact, as with the Roman Empire and all empires and decadent societies throughout history, such attacks are virtual metaphors for the self-destruction that essentially plagues us.

America has invited this situation by our abandonment of core values. Our society – indeed the West in general – is a Post-Christian culture. Among those who might say “I told you so” are the “great cloud of witnesses” described in the Bible (see Hebrews Chapter 11) and, by the totality of His Word and Commandments and Judgments, God Himself.

For further commentary (“Don’t take my word for it!”) I will commend some reflections by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He was the Soviet exile, a man who fought Communism and somehow survived persecution and prisons (the gulags) and escaped to the West after his writings were smuggled out of Russia; they won praise and Nobel Prizes.

I will quote him briefly but wish I could share his thousands of pages. Find his books! His analyses – his warnings – are dispositive today. They are not mere critiques of monstrous Communism. They recognize the Bureaucratic State that threatens “democracies” today. They attacked all of the decadent West. They recognized that the Crisis of the Twentieth Century was not confined to the Communist State into which he was born.

The infection, he said, is not Communism per se – although, of course, Marxism is alive in American education, media, and party politics – but secularism. The rejection of God. Therefore he attacked not only Stalin of the past but the Bidens of the present; not only the Soviet apparatchiks but the American Dark State:

If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than… “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”…The failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century.

We are witnesses to the devastation of the world, be it imposed or voluntarily undergone. …sucked into the vortex of atheism and self-destruction. This plunge into the abyss has aspects that are unquestionably global, dependent neither on political systems, nor on levels of economic and cultural development, nor yet on national peculiarities.

It was Dostoevsky… who drew from the French Revolution and its seething hatred for the Church the lesson that “revolution must necessarily begin with atheism.” That is absolutely true. But the world had never before known a godlessness as organized, militarized, and tenaciously malevolent as that preached by Marxism…. hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions.

Through decades of gradual erosion, the meaning of life in the West ceased to stand for anything more lofty than the pursuit of “happiness”, a goal that has even been solemnly guaranteed by constitutions. The concepts of good and evil have been ridiculed for several centuries; banished from common use, they have been replaced by political or class considerations of short-lived value. It has become embarrassing to appeal to eternal concepts, embarrassing to state that evil makes its home in the individual human heart before it enters a political system.

Atheist teachers in the West are bringing up a younger generation in a spirit of hate for their own society. Amid all the vituperation, it has been forgotten that the defects of capitalism represent the basic flaws of human nature, freed from all limitations just as the various human rights are; that under communism (and communism breathes down the neck of all moderate forms of socialism, which are unstable) — under communism the very same flaws become completely unbridled in any person with the last degree of authority; and that everyone else under that system truly does attain ‘equality’ — the equality of destitute slaves.

Instead of the ill-advised hopes of the last two centuries, which have reduced us to insignificance and brought us to the brink of nuclear and non-nuclear death, we can only reach with determination for the warm hand of God, which we have so rashly and self-confidently pushed away…. If we perish and lose this world, the fault will be ours alone.

From more than 50 years ago Solzhenitsyn speaks to us. Prophesies fulfilled before our eyes. Solutions under our noses.

Several correspondents have written lately to me about so many “gloom and doom” subjects in these messages, when I promise “a song in your hearts.” Well, yes. But I am a reporter of Biblical things and current events – I try to eavesdrop on the Lord. So these messages convey the facts of our situations, not fantasy.

God, however, writes “between the lines”! Turning to Him, repenting and reforming, will heal our land and dispel gloom and doom!

It is not too late – as individuals and as a nation!

For I the Lord will hold your right hand; Fear not! I will help you! (Isaiah 41:13)

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A dear friend has written that this is a song not in our hearts but to our hearts:

Click: Hold to God’s Unchanging Hand

1-11-21

It is said that Jesus is recorded more than 40 times in the Bible greeting people with the words “Fear Not.” Before any other words, instead of “Hi” or its Aramaic equivalent 2000 years ago, He spoke reassurance.

I have always loved how people in that magical corner of the world of Bavaria, South Tyrol, and Salzburg, Austria, greet each other with the words “Grüß Gott,” or Gruss Gott, the vestige of the affectionate, prayerful “God bless you.”

No matter how many times Jesus employed “Fear Not” – surely more often than recorded in the four Gospels – there is a Biblical principle God wants to emphasize. Some Bible scholars say the phrase appears 103 times throughout the entire Bible; others (probably marketers of Christian books) have discovered 365 incidents, and list them, or variations, page by page.

If phrases have slipped into popular culture, that just invites the danger of misuse or corruption. A popular cable-TV host frequently says “Let not your heart be troubled,” clearly not aware that he perverts the invitation of Jesus by omitting the rest of the sentence… or skirting blasphemy by implying that he is a god-like person.

Rather we should look at the Bible’s reinforcements of the principle, not the world’s corruption of it. “The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom…” Or, “God has not given us the spirit of fear…”

When Scripture reminds us that God is not the author of the spirit of fear, it does not mean there is no such thing as fear – but that God is not its author. Therefore it originates with Satan; and takes root when we give it a place in our emotions.

Are there things to fear these days? Yes. More than last week; more than last year. The question is, however, whether we yield to fear. Do we let it freeze us? Fear can chase us into dark corners and the fetal position. Or fear can challenge us, and make us bold.

Today’s guest blogger is the Apostle John, who transcribed a discussion with Jesus Christ:

“Let not your heart be troubled; you believe in God, believe also in Me. In My Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also. And where I go you know, and the way you know.”

Thomas said to Him, “Lord, we do not know where You are going, and how can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me. If you had known Me, you would have known My Father also; and from now on you know Him and have seen Him.”

Philip said to Him, “Lord, show us the Father, and it is sufficient for us.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and yet you have not known Me, Philip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father; so how can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me? The words that I speak to you I do not speak on My own authority; but the Father who dwells in Me does the works. Believe Me that I am in the Father and the Father in Me, or else believe Me for the sake of the works themselves….

“If you love Me, keep My commandments. And I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever – the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him; but you know Him, for He dwells with you and will be in you. I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you….

“These things I have spoken to you while being present with you. But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you.

Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid. You have heard Me say to you, ‘I am going away and coming back to you.’…

“And now I have told you before it comes, that when it does come to pass, you may believe. I will no longer talk much with you, for the ruler of this world is coming, and he has nothing in Me. But that the world may know that I love the Father, and as the Father gave Me commandment, so I do. Arise, let us go from here.”

The “things of this world” seem suddenly worse than we recently could have imagined. The rise of a hostile foreign power; the intrusions of unaccountable powers of Big Tech; a worldwide plague and fierce lockdowns; domestic terrorism; political turmoil; censorship daily being imposed…

Worse than ever before? Horrible, to be sure; and partly perilous because of its surprises. Worse than previous times in history? – other plagues; wars; genocides? Worse than prophecies? – the End Times? The Great Tribulation?

While not discounting the parlous dangers we face, a sense of perspective reminds us of other patriots. Military members who sacrifice even their lives. The shoeless volunteers who spent a winter in Valley Forge, leaving bloody footprints in the snow. First responders who routinely face danger and peril, but these days are disdained by mobs calling them ugly names, spitting on them, shooting them.

Reasons to fear, seemingly; things to fear. But no reason to surrender. Nothing to cause despair.

We have a country to redeem. We have a heritage to preserve. We have a Savior to trust.

Hold to God’s Unchanging Hand. Arise, and let us go from here.

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Click: Hold to God’s Unchanging Hand – Lindell Cooley

8-29-16

Nations almost always have traitors in their midst, and their motives are myriad – money, revenge, alien doctrines, contrary loyalties. Benedict Arnold probably is America’s most prominent traitor. He escaped to England, for whom he betrayed the Revolution and his supporter George Washington, to an appropriate life of loneliness and opprobrium. His go-between, British Major John André, was hanged as a spy. (In Tappan, NY, a bicycle ride from my high school in Old Tappan NJ; near old stomping grounds of Palisades, where I briefly ran an antiques shop; and Blauvelt, where some cousins lived.)

The spot of Maj. André’s hanging still has a marker, outside the Old ’76 House, a tavern where André was jailed awaiting the gallows. When I was a boy, the proximity, if not the reality, of historical events was almost romantic.

But I mean to address traitors and false prophets, not recount the peregrinations of a young teen, or old, naïve views of history. Treason is a serious thing. It is no longer fashionable, if I might use the word, or considered righteous to execute traitors these days. Many spies and traitors since Julius and Ethel Rosenberg have committed espionage – caused commensurate harm – to the United States, but I believe the Atom Bomb thieves were the last to receive the justice of every society’s severest penalty.

To lack the will to ultimately punish traitors is to condone treason; and is to encourage disloyalty. A hallmark of our times.

What traitors are to nations, false prophets are to believers.

We know that the Bible warns of false prophets – signs of the End of the Age – as well as the Anti-Christ and other dark figures. But looking back, so to speak, and not forward in prophecy, the Bible’s history is replete with false prophets. The most prominent (indeed, living now in subsequent general parlance) is Jezebel.

According to the book of I Kings she lived around 900 BC, a queen married to King Ahab of Israel. She persuaded the king and much of the kingdom to abandon Yahweh and worship Baal instead; she conspired, framed, and persecuted Hebrews for their faith. Ultimately she was rejected and was literally overthrown: pushed to her death from a palace window, her flesh devoured by dogs, as the account goes.

Readers of my essays, or casual visitors, might wonder in this election season, and by the title of this essay, whether I am going to identify Jezebels in our midst. False prophets? A woman?

That is not a Hill I will climb here. My use of the term “President” here is metaphorical: our virtual and generic leaders can be considered as “presidents” in their realms. But I want to look at the array of persuasive, influential, prominent, consequential figures in our culture. Our bosses. In biblical days, and through feudal times, “lords.” Trend-setters; role models. All virtual “presidents” – presiding over areas of our lives.

How many are Jezebels, male or female? How many are false prophets? These days, most of them. Remembering my distinction between traitors and false prophets, we can truthfully say that almost all of our modern leaders are false prophets.

Many of them “preach” such “truths” as:

There is no God;
There is no such things as sin;
There is no heaven or hell;
We may eat, drink, and be merry with no consequences;
Drug use need not be discouraged;
Adultery is fine;
Abortion is not murder;
Truth is relative, everyone’s personal choice;
Black is white;
Up is down.

I added a couple… not really stretches, though. These Contemporary Ten Commandments come at us rat-a-tat from government, media, journalism, the educational establishment, entertainment, and, sadly, much of the church. What do false prophets do? Using a biblically historical paradigm, they induce us to worship false idols. Mammon, of course. “Instant gratification” is a sacrifice to the god of Self. Abortion – infanticide, little different except for labels and settings of clinics instead of volcanoes – is child-sacrifice to the gods of convenience and a new morality.

As I said above, what traitors are to nations, false prophets are to believers. And to innocent folks trying to make their ways in this world. They are glitzy celebrities and influential politicians, and bling-bling entertainers and heroes, so-called. But remember the words of Jesus:

“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits” (Matt. 7:15-16b). He also said that in the end times, “Many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many” (Mt 24:11).

We can make lists, long lists, of ways to recognize false prophets. These times are upon us. I would ask you to remember two important things that can sum up the (broken) law and the (false) prophets:

1. When Jesus said that false prophets will deceive many, He did not mean “many of the unbelievers”! Unbelievers are already out in the spiritual “cold.” No. Many believers, members of the Church, faithful followers of Christ, devout and pious folk, even the Elect… shall be deceived. Be. on. your. watch.

2. All the warnings and checklists and litmus-tests and watchwords are worthless against the only dispositive standard: do the people, and their policies, glorify Christ? Is the Bible the bedrock? Are you directed to Jesus?

Is there a “shadow of turning”? Any compromise that is “hoped” will make people amenable to the Gospel? Reject it! The World System hates us, and lies to us.

Remember what Paul wrote in his second letter to the church at Corinth (2:1-2): “When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I decided to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.”

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Click: Hold To God’s Unchanging Hand

This week, the whole world watched the rescue of the miners in Chile, and the whole world was inspired — it could not be otherwise.

I watched through the night; many of us did. Being an old guy, a portion of my amazement was the technology improvised for their rescue, but more, the fact the cameras could broadcast from half a mile under rock; and then, I could watch it in real time 6000 miles away. (Frankly, I was amazed that I could make my TV-remote work that evening, but that’s me)

We have heard a lot about the miners, and will hear a lot more as interviews, books, and movies will surely follow. But I share with you a few random impressions I had:

* 33 miners, 69 days… I am not into Bible codes and biblical numerology, but occasionally God DOES leave spiritual reminders in worldly events (three is the Biblical sign of godly perfection — the Trinity; three days before the Resurrection; etc) to remind us of His workings. That said…

* The miners were resourceful, strong, and organized… but also, it seems almost a man, spiritual. Reportedly half were Catholic and half evangelical or Pentecostal. The Vatican sent missals and Rosaries down the first shaft, when opened; and a Baptist church sent Bibles and hymn books. (Evangelicalism is sweeping the continent. There are more Pentecostals than Catholics, for instance, in neighboring Brazil.) There were frequent services and constant prayers underground.

* Through the night President Sebastian Pinera was seen praying quietly on a bench, not showing off but with head bowed, crossing himself afterward. The first rescuer who descended in the capsule said a prayer and crossed himself before the door was closed.

* Many miners used their first words above ground to thank God. Some fells to their knees immediately — were they collapsing? No, they were in prayer; some held their little Bibles high.

* Several miners donned T-shirts when they were unhooked from the capsule. Family members, too, had been wearing them. On the front they said, “Gracias Senor” — Thank you, Lord. And on the backs was a Bible verse: “To Him be the glory and honor. Because in His hands are the depths of the earth; and the heights of the mountains are His” (Psalm 95:4)

* At least one miner received Christ during the ordeal, and — regarding that number “3” — one miner said that there were really 34 in the mine, because he felt that Jesus was always with them.

* Finally, I remember that one miner said something along these lines: “We faced God down there… and we faced the devil. God won. We reached out and held His hand.”

Holding to God’s unchanging hand… do you know the simple but powerful song with that title? It seems almost written FOR this event we witnessed! Franklin L Eiland, composer of many great hymns, wrote this about 100 years ago (He was grandfather of Cindy Walker, the first female songwriters elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame).

This version is sung by Lindell Cooley, who was Worship Leader at the Brownsville Revival in Pensecola when I went there a couple times a dozen years ago. Today he is pastor of Grace Church in Nashville. Powerful performance, and relevant to the miracles of faith we just witnessed.

Click:  Hold to God’s Unchanging Hand

Have a great week holdin’ on…