America's Suicide - Part 1

Blessings to Israel presents Discerning the Times, a program committed to encouraging you to view current events through the lens of the Bible. Now in honor of the one and only true God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, please join us for today's program. In America, the gospel is everywhere.

We have a church almost on every corner. The Word of God is streamed. The Word of God is beamed. The Word of God is on radio.

It's on television. It's in books. Bibles are everywhere. It's everywhere. Amen. We're inundated with it.

As a matter of fact, we have so much Word that we tend not to pay attention to it. But I want you to know that God holds us responsible for what we know. And He holds us responsible spiritually. He holds us responsible physically.

He holds us responsible politically in every way. See, what we know is supposed to affect what we do, how we behave, how we vote. America is in trouble. That is the message that we hear from pulpits today for those who are speaking the truth.

Unfortunately, there are not a lot of those who are, but there are those who are waking up and speaking the truth that America is in trouble. So that is what we're going to talk about today. Welcome to the program.

My name is Brian Thomas. So glad to be with you. And today's guest we are so honored to have as he is here to talk about a recent book that he has authored titled America's Suicide. I'm referring to Dr. David Reagan, who founded Lamb & Lion Ministries in 1980 for the purpose of proclaiming the soon return of Jesus following a 20-year career as a professor of international law and politics.

He headed up the ministry for 41 years, hosting the radio and television programs while authoring 17 books. And again, he's here today to talk with us about his recent book, America's Suicide, where he states America is in a free fall without a parachute. So, Dr. Reagan, thank you so much for joining us. It is an honor and a privilege to have you on the program.

Well, thank you very much, Brian. I consider it an honor and privilege to be on your program. I highly respect your ministry and the fact that you are an expert on Bible prophecy and that you avoid the great problem of modern Bible prophecy, and that is sensationalism. And you stick with the Word of God and proclaim it.

Thank you so much. Those words mean so much. And you are just a giant in the faith. You have been such a great influence on myself in ministry and so many others over the years. And so again, it's really an honor to have you. So you're here to talk today about your book, America's Suicide. But before we get into that, you stepped down from Lamb & Lion Ministries as the leader a couple of years ago. So share with our listeners what you've been doing in the time since then.

Yes. Well, Brian, when I founded this ministry in 1980, I didn't call it Dave Reagan Ministry. I called it Lamb & Lion Ministries.

Those were the two great prophetic symbols used by the Old Testament prophets to speak of the Messiah, that He would come the first time as the suffering lamb and return as the conquering lion. But I made it that because I wanted it to be a ministry that would succeed me if the Lord didn't come while I was alive and well, that He would, that somebody else would pick it up and move it on. I didn't want it to end with me.

So that was my goal from the very beginning. And several years ago, I found a man that I felt like had all of the qualities to take over and lead the ministry. His name was Tim Moore. He was a colonel in the United States Air Force. And I had known him for many years. In fact, he was serving on our board of trustees. I called him the Renaissance Man because he was, at one time, he was serving as a flight instructor for UPS, serving as a colonel in the US Air Force Reserve, and serving in the Kentucky State Legislature.

And how anybody does that is beyond me. But anyway, he is a very, very gifted person. And our board decided to call him to replace me. I had wanted to retire in May of 2020, which would be the 40th anniversary of the ministry.

But he was not able to take over at that time, so we delayed a year. And I retired. I use retired in quotation marks. I retired on June the 1st of 2021 after 41 years of service with the ministry. And what I did is I moved my office to my home, and I still work part-time for the ministry and writing magazine articles and writing books. In fact, I've written four additional books since I supposedly retired. So that's what I'm doing these days is I'm just focusing on writing books. I'm no longer in the leadership of the ministry and no longer involved in it in any way as a leader. So I'm on the side writing books and magazine articles.

All right. Well, we praise God for you, your ministry, and all the labor that you've done over the years is blessing many. And it's so great to hear that you're continuing to work for the Lord. So again, we're here to talk about your book, America's Suicide.

And you write again that America is in a freefall without a parachute. So let's go back to the beginning of our nation, the founding of our nation. How has God blessed the nation, going back to the very beginning? Well, He has blessed our nation overwhelmingly from the beginning.

I think the great blessing began with the tremendous men who were there at the beginning who formed the Constitution of the United States. Nearly all of them were, well, all of them were believers in God. There were no atheists among them. And nearly all of them were Christians.

There were a few who were not. For example, Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson would be described as deists who did not necessarily believe in Jesus as the Son of God. But they were persons who believed in God. And so all of them were believers in God, and nearly all of them were Christians. And this is reflected in our Constitution. The reason our Constitution has produced the greatest nation in the history of the world, and a nation of abundant freedom and prosperity, is because it was based upon God's Word.

Here's how that happened. All these men knew the Bible, even those who were not Christians. They knew the Bible. And they knew that the Bible taught that man is fundamentally flawed, that people are born with a sin nature.

And they therefore designed our Constitution from the beginning to deal with the flawed sin nature of man. Now that goes against the prevailing view in the world, which is humanism. Humanism is the belief in man that we don't need God, that we can do it ourselves. And humanism, one of the fundamental aspects of humanism, is a belief in the essential goodness of man.

That man is basically good, and all we have to do is educate him and make him more sophisticated, and he will be even better. The Bible says, note, that man is born with an evil sin nature, and that man will follow that nature unless there are limits placed upon him. And they believed in those limits. One of the things that's absolutely amazing about our Founding Fathers is they didn't even believe in themselves.

Most of them were aristocrats, not all of them, but many of them were. And you would have thought they would have formed an oligarchy where a government ruled by aristocrats. No, they didn't even trust themselves. So what they did was to craft a Constitution that would control the evil nature of man as much as possible. And they did that, for example, by setting up a representative republic. They did not set up a democracy.

People think they did, they did not. They did not trust democracy. They believe that a democracy always leads to absolute chaos, because when you have a pure democracy, what happens is that people start buying votes and people start promising things that are totally unreasonable in order to get elected.

And so what happens is that a democracy destroys itself. So what they did is they set up a representative government in which you could only vote directly for one person in the federal government. As they set up the original Constitution, there was only one person you could vote for directly, and that was your congressman, your local congressman. Senators were selected by state legislatures.

The president was selected by an electoral college, so any vote for him would be indirect. And this was, again, designed to control the mob, because in democracies, mobs take over. The other thing they did was they set up a separation of powers between the executive and the legislative branches and the judicial branches, all, again, designed to control the inevitable bad nature of man. Jeremiah 17 says there is nothing on the face of this earth that is more despicable and depraved than the heart of man. And so they believe that, and that's the kind of government they set up, and that was one of the things that has really been a blessing to us throughout our history.

God also gave us some great leaders who were determined to rule according to the people and their will and not according to some oligarchical ideas. And yet those very men who formed this great Constitution, those great men who led it in those early years, are the men whose statues are being torn down in America today, because the people believe that they were evil men because some of them owned slaves. And the thing that's interesting is, in this moral superiority that's being shown today about people tearing down monuments, is that I would be willing to bet you that 90 to 95 percent of those tearing down those monuments believe in killing babies.

They are tearing down these men's monuments because in the society of that time there was slavery, but they think that's horrible, but they see nothing wrong with killing babies. Exactly. Wow. So it's really a despicable situation we have on our hands today. It really is. Yeah, and it was so clever the way in which our founding fathers laid out the Constitution, and it had to be from God.

It had to be a God-led thing. And I'm so glad that you pointed out that we are a republic and not a democracy, because I hear so many people that will incorrectly say that. And I think, as you mentioned, you made such a great point of those who are into power grabs, it seems, are the ones who you hear saying we are a democracy.

But that is not correct, and I'm so glad you pointed that out. The influences have grown in our nation over the years. We have moved to convert it from a representative republic to a democracy. One of the first steps of that was the Constitutional Amendment.

I forget what year it was, but it was early in the 1900s. It was a constitutional amendment to provide for the direct election of senators so that people vote for them directly instead of the state representatives, the state legislatures, selecting the senators. And of course, the other thing is that today the progressives are crying for us to do away with the electoral college so we can directly elect the president. When we get to all that sort of direct election, then what you're going to have is people buying votes. For example, right now we have a president who's promising the nation that it's amazing, his timing, with coming up on a midterm election and he immediately promises that he's going to forgive the debt, hundreds of millions of dollars of debt that students owe our nation. Well, why should I pay for their college education?

There's no reason for me to pay for it. They took out the loans, they owe them money, but it's just a blatant attempt to buy votes. And this is what happens when you get a pure democracy. People simply start playing to the mob and promising anything and everything in the world that they'll vote for them. Yeah, yeah, that's so true.

So true. You touched on those out there who believe that a woman should have a right to kill an unborn baby. So on that note, you mentioned in your book of the fact that our nation has turned its back on God.

So I want you to speak to that. But before you do so, I want to play a clip of one of our nation's leaders that is talking about taking the life of the unborn, amongst other things. OK. Vice President Kamala Harris took the stage in a room with other elected officials and members of the Texas Democratic Party. If you believe that women's rights and LGBTQ plus rights are fundamental to America, vote for Democrats.

The event raises money for voter advocacy and community organizing. The vice president highlighting what she says are the accomplishments of the Biden administration. Just two days ago, the president announced he would pardon all past federal marijuana offenses. Nobody should have to go to jail for smoking weed. So, Dr. Reagan, right there, you hear from our vice president, she is condoning the killing of the unborn, she's calling what God says is an abomination, that it's a good thing. And then she's saying that drugs should be legal. So speak to how our nation has turned its back on God. Very interesting, since when she was serving as an attorney general in California, she sent more people to prison for smoking weed than anybody else.

But now she says it's a terrible evil. You know, the hypocrisy of liberals in America today is really mind boggling. They are against guns and yet they're surrounded by guards who have guns. They're against the wall. And yet they all live in houses behind walls. They're for public education, yet they all send their kids to private schools.

And it goes on and on and on. It's just sickening the hypocrisy that is there. With regard to abortion, the thing that gets me about that is that they always say that no one has a right to tell a woman what she can do with her body. It's her body. It's not her body.

That body belongs to the Lord. The Lord was the one who created it and we don't have the right to do anything with it that we please. Second, they talk about freedom of choice.

Well, we like to really talk. They never finish that sentence. Freedom of choice. What do you mean by freedom of choice? Well, the freedom to kill my baby. They don't want to say that. But that's what they're really talking about. And when they say that a woman has the right to do what she pleases with her body, what about the body of the baby? We're talking about the killing of a human being and what could be more precious than a baby in the womb.

It's amazing. We have a law that protects eagles in the egg. If you destroy an eagle egg, you're going to be sent to federal prison. Why? Because they know that an eagle in the egg is an eagle.

And then one day it's going to hatch and be a full grown eagle. And yet they say it's OK to kill a baby in the womb because it's just a fetus. They try to use some language that dehumanizes it. You know, the worst decision the Supreme Court ever made in our history was the one right before the Civil War, the Dred Scott decision, in which they ruled that black people in America were equivalent to cattle that could be used, could be bought and sold at will, and that they had no standing of the Constitution. Well, that was a horrible decision. But what about the horrible decision of Roe versus Wade saying that babies in the womb have no protection whatsoever? They're not human beings and you can kill them at will. Those are the two worst decisions the Supreme Court ever made.

We have a protection in our Constitution of life, liberty and the pursuit of justice for all human beings. And I say to you, a baby in the womb is a human being. Absolutely, absolutely. And to our listeners, we'll share at the end of the program how you can get a copy of the book that we are speaking on, America's Suicide, in which Dave Reagan lays out so beautifully of where our nation has gone since its inception to where we are today. You also asked the question in the book, is our fundamental problem systemic racism, as many claim?

And you answer the question. And Dr. Reagan, it seems today that people are drunk, it seems, on the topic of racism. What do you have to say in the book about systemic racism? Well, you're right about being drunk on racism.

You know that very well. If you disagree, for example, today with the progressives on anything, anything, you're immediately a racist. No matter what it is, you're a racist.

And they try to make people feel guilty and all that. If you, for example, back when Obama was president, if you criticized him for anything, you were racist. And you weren't criticizing him on the basis of race, you were criticizing him on the basis of the issues that he was standing for.

How somebody can call this nation a racist nation when they elected a black man as president of the United States is beyond me. And I tell you, on this systemic racism, Brian, to show you how silly it is, when this broke out and people started using that term, I was watching TV one day and they were showing a group of demonstrators at the Dallas City Hall. And they were demonstrating a tremendous demonstration there. And the TV interviewer walked up to one of them, it looked like he was about 17 or 18 years old, and said, what are you demonstrating against? And he said, systemic racism. And I thought, boy, that guy, where did he get that term?

What does he know about that term? And it was obvious that everybody in that group before they went out to demonstrate had been told, if you're asked, it's systemic racism, whether you know what that means or not. Now to show you how silly that was, that a person was at the Dallas City Hall demonstrating against systemic racism is, number one, the most powerful person in Dallas is the city manager.

We have a city manager form of government. And he is the most powerful person in Dallas, black man, mayor, black man, the majority of the city council, black community, the sheriff, a Hispanic lesbian, the district attorney, a black man, everybody in the position of power in the city of Dallas was a minority. Where is the systemic racism?

That would have been impossible when I was growing up. When I was growing up, there was systemic racism, but it would have been impossible for any of those people to have been elected to a position of power. Yet we see minorities and positions of power all over this nation. I might say that quite often when they are in power, they really don't do anything for their minority group.

Yeah, you're so right. And you gave me the privilege a few years ago of writing an editorial for your magazine on the topic. And I did point out how I was watching television one day and they were going from one city to another showing these press conferences of chiefs of police. And I looked at my wife and I said, every single one of them is a black woman, but yet all we hear is their systemic racism.

So how, how are they, how are they in these positions of leadership? And also to your point with Barack Obama as president, and I told people, I said, look, we're only as blacks in this country, we make up about 13% of the nation. There are not enough blacks to vote Barack Obama into office. So it had to be a number of whites that voted for him.

So it's such a false claim. Well, to get back to systemic racism, that is not the problem in this nation. The overwhelming problem in this nation is systemic godlessness. We have forgotten about God.

That is the fundamental problem of this nation. We have turned our back on God. We have forgotten about God. And the Bible is very clear that when a nation does that, that nation is begging for the judgment of God and for its destruction. Psalm 917 says, the wicked will go down to the grave, and this is the fate of all nations who ignore God.

That's Psalm 917. We are a nation that's turned our back on God. And let me tell you, I am 84 years old. Most people today do not know about the nation that I grew up in.

They have no idea. When I tell young people about it, they look at me like I was dropped off another planet, and they simply can't believe the nation that I grew up in. I grew up in a nation that had a Christian commitment. I mean, this was a nation that was based upon Christian principles from the very beginning.

And when I was growing up in the 1940s and the 1950s, it was still a nation that was based upon Christian principles. For example, when I was growing up in the 40s and 50s, nobody planned anything on Sunday or on Wednesday. Because everybody in this nation, almost everybody, was going to church on Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night. People didn't plan things on those occasions.

The idea of showing football games on TV on a Sunday would have been unthinkable. Everything closed down in this nation on Sunday. Everything except the most required things like service stations and pharmacies closed down.

They were not even open. You couldn't buy anything on Sunday, and you had to plan for that during the week because people reverenced the Lord's Day. We had prayers everywhere we went for high school football, for everything. Everything that was always opened with a prayer. When I was in school, we opened every day with prayer. We opened with Bible readings over the public address system. We had Christmas plays.

We had Easter plays. People were grounded in the Word of God in my senior year in high school. My senior year in high school was 1956.

I'm really an old guy. But in 1956, our senior reader in English, our English reader, was Bible stories with a moral at the end of the story. People today can't even imagine that, but that is what we were back in those days. The result of it was that young people grew up with moral standards.

They grew up understanding what was right and wrong. To show you the impact of that, when I graduated from high school in 1956 in Waco, Texas, we had 450 in our graduating class. On any given day, we had about 200 vehicles on the parking lot, most of which were pickup trucks. In every pickup truck, without exception, there was a gun rack. On that gun rack was a deer rifle, a.22, and a shotgun.

Usually, there was a pistol in the glove compartment. Nobody thought anything about it because kids had grown up learning what was right and wrong. Nobody was concerned about them coming in and shooting people or doing anything of that nature. Today, our kids are moral pygmies. They don't know right from wrong. They haven't been taught the Word of God.

They haven't been taught anything like that, and you find them killing each other over tennis shoes. Wow, wow. Dr. Reagan, how can our listeners get a copy of this book, America's Suicide? Well, you can go to the ministry's website at lamblion.com. That's lamblion.com.

No and in the middle, just lamblion.com. You can order it there, or you can call the ministry at the telephone number you'll find on the website. The book is only short. I write short books, and I write them that way on purpose because I know that people don't read anymore much. So this book runs about 150 pages maximum, and it's written for the person and the few. It's not written for theologians.

It's easy to read, and I think the ministry sells it for $20, including the cost of shipping. Dr. Reagan, thank you so much. It is always a blessing and an honor to talk with you. Thank you so much for coming on and speaking with us today, and I pray that God will just continue to bless you as you continue doing work for his kingdom, even in your days of retirement. Well, thank you, Brian, and all I can say is that I have enormous respect for you and your ministry. You are one of the most erudite speakers around on Bible prophecy.

You know how to talk where people understand. You are right on base with regard to what the Bible says about end-time prophecy, and I congratulate you on the fact that you've never wallowed in sensationalism like so many Bible prophecy teachers have done. Well, coming from a man of your stature, those words mean so much to me, as you have paved the way for so many in the ministry of Bible prophecy, and you've had a tremendous influence over my life as a counselor and mentor and just a genuine friend for a number of years. So I thank you so much. God bless you.

And to our listeners, Dr. Reagan will be back with us next week. So please come back and join us as we continue to discern the times by viewing life through the lens of the Bible. Until then, remember to pray for the peace of Jerusalem. Bless God's great nation of Israel. To the only wise God, be glory through Jesus Christ forever.

Amen. Thank you for tuning in to Discerning the Times. Please come back and join us next week as we continue to encourage you to view current events through the lens of the Bible. Until next time, remember to pray for the peace of Jerusalem. Bless God's great nation of Israel and seek first the kingdom of God. Discerning the Times is presented by Blessings to Israel.