Perspective on the Decline—Or Is It the Rise?—of the American Empire. Part 2

Perspective on the decline or is it the rise of the American empire? Today is part two of that topic, right here on the Christian Real View Radio Program, where the mission is to sharpen the biblical worldview of Christians and to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ. I'm David Wheaton, the host. A listener-supported radio ministry. You can connect with us by visiting our website, thechristianrealview.org, calling toll-free 1-888-646-2233, or by writing to Box 401, Excelsior, Minnesota 55331. The prophet Isaiah spoke the following about God's control over nations and rulers. He it is who reduces rulers to nothing, who makes the judges of the earth meaningless. Scarcely have they been planted, scarcely have they been sown, scarcely has their stock taken root in the earth, but He, God, merely blows on them and they wither, and the storm carries them away like stubble.

That's a portion from Isaiah chapter 40. Last week Christian journalist Alex Newman joined us to discuss whether the United States is withering and in decline like other great empires in history. He pointed to the rampant immorality of our nation, whether heterosexual, homosexual, transvestism, abortion. He pointed to the exorbitant spending and debt of our nation and the growing rejection of our constitutional values as common markers of empire decline throughout history. Now the other possibility is that the American empire is not declining but actually rising to be the leader of the global empire described in Revelation, the evil world system of, quote, Babylon the Great that Christ will return to destroy someday.

So this week in part two Alex will discuss more markers of American empire decline such as uncontrolled immigration and the unequal administration of justice. The Bible is clear that the future does not revolve around the United States but around God's chosen nation Israel and the Jewish people. In Paul's letter to the Romans he writes, For I do not want you brethren to be uninformed of this mystery, that a partial hardening has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in, and so all Israel will be saved. This comes from Romans chapter 11 verses 25 and 26. Does he mean that Israel and the Jews who despite being back in their historic homeland are living in rejection of God and his son Jesus Christ that they someday will be saved? Yes, that's exactly what he means and what the final book of the Bible, Revelation, describes. So in light of that truth we will also hear the first part of an interview with Chris Katolka, radio host for the Friends of Israel Gospel Ministry.

This is a long time organization which seeks to meet the spiritual and physical needs of the Jewish people. Chris will explain the history of modern day Israel and the Palestinians and many more dynamics taking place there and around the world. Now before we get to the second part of the interview to start the program with Alex Newman, we're going to play a couple minutes from a recent commentary by Sean Hannity of Fox News Channel where he goes point by point through some major threats that our country is facing both at home and abroad. Well, it's not a biblical analysis, especially as it relates to prophecy in Israel. It's interesting to note that he and other political conservatives see our country in a very tenuous state.

Welcome to Hannity and also welcome to Biden's disaster of America. Now tonight Israeli soldiers, they are on the ground in Gaza battling Hamas. Other units from the IDF, they are clashing with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Americans and hundreds of others, they are still being held hostage underground in Gaza, a network of 300 miles of underground terror tunnels to kill Israelis and to take them hostage. That is the war that Hamas has been waging against Israel. This is your state of the world under your president, Joe Biden, and another massive war still raging close by with hundreds of thousands dead in Ukraine and millions displaced and Joe wanting to basically fight a proxy war with Russia and not causing Europe to pay their fair share. Back at home, what's going on here? China is buying up acres, thousands of acres of farmland and ranch land in our country and near U.S. military installations all while threatening our allies and our soldiers in the Pacific.

When they are not flying their spy balloons, gathering intel over our military bases or confronting our fighter jets in international airspace or our Navy in international waters, well, this is what the Chinese do and they're getting away with it. Meanwhile, look at the economy. Inflation is through the roof, houses now are unaffordable, over 8% for a 30-year fixed rate mortgage, and in our country, a level of antisemitism, outright left-wing bigotry and hatred.

It is on the rise in a way I never thought I'd see in my lifetime and I doubt many of you thought you'd see in yours. And by the way, have you noticed the border is an utter disaster? Under Joe Biden, over 8 million illegal immigrants will cross into this country by the end of this year, maybe as high as 9, maybe as high as 10 million. That is roughly the population of New York City.

This is your State of the Union under Joe Biden, your president. This includes, by the way, at our border, 659 people from Iran. Why are Iranians coming to our border? 538 from Syria, along with thousands of other special interest aliens from the Middle East. Why are they coming here?

Who's paying for them to coming here? Why isn't there any real vetting of the people crossing that border? Because I'll tell you right now, the next 9-11 is almost certainly being plotted and planned from inside our country. Again, that was Sean Hannity basically saying the world is on fire and America is weak, blaming it all on the leftist policies of the Biden administration. Now, just leaving the political blame aside for a second, the point for the purposes of this program is that there are world-changing wars taking place between Russia and Ukraine and with Israel and surrounding enemies. And there are major problems domestically with China, with immigration and other existential threats to our country. But now let's bring some biblical analysis to it in part two of our conversation with Christian journalist Alex Newman as he explains other key markers to the ones he elaborated on last week of an American empire in decline, such as unfettered immigration and an unjust justice system. This next topic we'll talk about, Alex, is immigration. According to the Highland County Press, the number of illegal border crossings at the northern and southern borders of America in all ports of entry, not just the southern border, since January 2021, that's just two and a half years ago, basically, totals more than 8 million people, which is greater than the individual populations of 38 U.S. states.

So when an empire, Alex, can't control its border and people are just rushing in the taxing of a system, the crime, the everything else is very devastating to a society, to an empire. By the way, religious organizations, so-called religious organizations, are spearheading this illegal immigration. The website Revolver.news actually did a story on this, and they said in this column, who are the types of people welcoming immigrants into our country? It may surprise readers to learn that ostensibly Christian charities are responsible for bringing foreigners to small towns throughout America. Have you noticed that a lot of this resettlement is done in small towns? The government works with nine volunteer agencies for refugee resettlement, five of which are nominally Christian. The nine are Church World Service, Episcopal Migration Ministries, Ethiopian Community Development Council, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, International Rescue Committee, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services, U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, they're a big one, and finally World Relief, another ostensibly Christian organization. The article goes on to say, much attention is paid to the Catholic charities and their efforts to aid migrants, legal and illegal, in America. Less attention is paid to the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, a group that was instrumental in bringing Somalis to Minnesota.

One of those Somalis, incidentally, is the terrorist sympathizing Congresswoman Ilhan Omar from Minnesota. Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, like the other charities, isn't a mere nonprofit. It's an appendage of the U.S. government. Over 80% of its funding comes from the federal government. In 2018, it received over $41 million in state assistance. That's just the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services.

The other agencies, with the exception of one of them, also received the majority of their funding from the federal government. The Lutheran Services proclaims itself as guided by a fundamental Christian purpose. Its description on the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America's website, ELCA, reads, We are a church that does God's work in the world and in local communities, pursuing justice, peace and human dignity for and with all people. This is an obviously theologically liberal worldview that brings in migrants, doesn't matter who they are, where they come from, who don't ascribe to constitutional American values. And the result is obvious.

There'll be division in the country and a dilution of American values. This is a worldview of globalism. Final paragraph, the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service isn't even run by a Christian. Its current president and CEO is Krishnanti Vignarajah, a Hindu woman with impeccable globalist credentials. She was born in Sri Lanka and came to the U.S. as a child. She has degrees from Yale and Oxford. Later on, she became a high ranking staffer in the Obama administration. She worked as a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton and John Kerry at the State Department.

She finished her time in the administration as Michelle Obama's policy director. So, Alex, after reading all of that, it may seem obvious. But what is the purpose behind letting so many unvetted people, immigrants, into this country, especially when you see the videos?

It's like most of them are just young males, it seems like. Now, some Americans will say, well, these will be workers to do jobs that Americans won't do. But these numbers are just, I think, incomprehensible to even try to fathom how this is going to impact our empire. There are several critical factors at work here, David. And so I think there are different interest groups that are being supportive of this.

In many cases, I think naively, because they think it's in their interest. So you have the teachers unions, right? They recognize that families are fleeing the government school system.

They recognize that the number of children being born is now significantly smaller than it was in previous generations. And they're saying, hey, we're going to have to downsize our government school system. We're going to have to have layoffs. So the teachers unions are thinking, oh, this will be great. You know, we'll just let in a bunch of illegal immigrants.

We'll have butts in the seats. That means our funding will stay high for the government school system. So they're in support of this. You have the major companies, many of them in bed with the World Economic Forum, thinking, oh, this will be great for cheap labor, right? We'll drive down the cost of labor. We won't have to pay Americans, you know, twenty dollars an hour to do something because we can hire some illegal immigrants and they'll do it for ten dollars an hour.

So that'll help us increase our profits at the end of the year. And I think these are very superficial reasons. I've also spent some time and I've interviewed repeatedly the former head of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, Tom Homan, interviewed Mark Morgan, former head of Customs and Border Protection. I asked him, why do you think this is happening? And they both suggested that really this is political.

The Democrats realized that their coalition is falling apart, more and more people are leaving the Democrat Party, and so they need new voters. And there's probably truth to that. I don't want to deny that at all. These are very smart men who served at the highest levels in this issue of border security. But I think there's much more going on here. I think it goes back to some of what we talked about earlier. God is the one who divided mankind into nations.

That was part of his design in this fallen world. I think we're witnessing here an effort, first of all, to undermine the nation state. And I saw this so clearly living in Europe, David. I spent many years living in Europe. Most recently I was living in Sweden, which was really ground zero for mass immigration. The Swedish government, while I was living there, just opened up the border and said anybody who gets here and says they're from Syria can have a permanent residence card. About a third of the population of Sweden now is foreign born.

Most of these are coming from the Islamic world, Africa, the Middle East. And this is now true all across Europe. You look at London, for example, Brits are a minority in their own capital city. They now have a Muslim mayor for the first time in a thousand years. They have a pagan leader for their country. People haven't been talking about this.

This is hugely significant. In Frankfurt, one of the great cities of Germany, Germans are in the minority. In Malmo in Sweden, Swedes are in the minority. In Brussels, Belgians are a tiny minority. They make up less than one-fourth of the population of their own capital city now.

And this is all by design. What happens is people wake up and they say, hey, I'm surrounded by people who don't speak the same language as me. They don't have anything in common with me. They don't have the same culture as me. They don't have the same values as me.

They don't have the same religious heritage as me. Why do we have these arbitrary imaginary lines on the map saying that this is Sweden or this is Germany or this is France? We'll just be Europeans under the European Union and then eventually one world.

We'll just be one human family under a global system. And that's not speculation. They say this pretty openly.

The UN migration czar, Peter Sutherland, who has now passed away, used to be a big executive at Goldman Sachs. He actually said that part of the reason they're doing this, they want to undermine these old shibboleths, the idea of national sovereignty, these historic memories that we have of our own country. I think another critical factor here is an effort to de-Christianize what used to be known as Christendom, David. And we see this so clearly. I saw it so clearly in Sweden.

It could not have been more obvious. So you have the apostate Lutheran Church of Sweden, a lesbian bishop who runs it, saying we need to take down all the crosses from the churches so that we don't offend these new Muslim arrivals. We need to build Muslim prayer rooms in our churches facing Mecca so that these new arrivals can worship God, their God, I suppose, although she didn't put it that way, in our churches. So we're seeing now this very rapid de-Christianization. They now want to take the crosses off the Scandinavian flags. They want to take the cross off the flag of Switzerland because now we're a multicultural society and the cross isn't representative of who we are. They took down the crosses from all the public school classrooms in Italy because, well, there's so many Muslims now and we need to be representative. Now they don't have Christmas markets in many of the major European cities. These are historic. They've been there for hundreds of years.

Now they're called winter wonderland markets. So we're watching the rapid de-Christianization of what used to be known as Christendom. The Christian heritage in the legal system is being deliberately destroyed.

The Christian cultural heritage is being deliberately destroyed. And so to kind of summarize, I believe the reason we're seeing this mass migration, they're encouraging it by blowing up all these countries. Look what they did to Libya. Look what they did to Syria. Look what they did to Iraq. I mean, our government did these things. So they bombed these countries to smithereens.

They blow up all their infrastructure. Then they say, oh, but don't worry, you can come to Germany. You can come to Sweden. You can come to the United States.

You can come to Canada. This is like an arsonist burning down somebody's home and then inviting them to live in yours and pretending to be humanitarian. I mean, it's a crime, not humanitarian, but that's what they're doing.

And the reason they're doing it, David, I think the two most important reasons, one, de-Christianize the nations and two, undermine the nations. Now, the United States specifically, I think there's an added element here. The Biden administration knows that we have massive numbers of special operations forces from the People's Liberation Army of China coming across our border. They know that we have massive numbers of highly trained jihadists coming across the border. Now, a lot of these are sleeper cells. They're going to get jobs as busboys, as waiters, as cooks, as janitors, and they're keeping their heads down.

They're not even getting speeding tickets. And when the time is right, they've got the blueprints for our water treatment facilities. They've got the blueprints for our power stations. They've got the blueprints for critical infrastructure. And I believe when the time is right, they will be activated. They will try to unleash chaos in this country.

And so, you know, again, to go back to what we were saying earlier, I think it would be prudent for people to prepare for things to get rocky. Alex Newman is our guest today, a journalist and CEO of Liberty Sentinel Media. You can find links to his work at our website, thechristianrealview.org.

We're talking about the decline, or is it the rise, of the American empire? We have more coming up with Alex after this break to tell you about some ministry resources. You're listening to the Christian Real View Radio Program.

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I'm David Wheaton. Be sure to visit our website, thechristianrealview.org, where you can subscribe to our free weekly email and annual print letter, order resources for adults and children, and support the ministry. Our topic today is perspective on the decline or is it the rise of the American empire? Today is part two of that topic with our guest Alex Newman, journalist and CEO of Liberty Sentinel Media. Alex, let me just give an example of how immigration from those from different religions and different cultures impacts a nation.

This is from Wikipedia. Hamza Haroon Yousaf is a Scottish politician who has served as first minister of Scotland since March 2023, and that is the top political position in Scotland. Now listen to his background. Born to Pakistani immigrants in Glasgow, Yousaf studied politics at the University of Glasgow before working as a parliamentary assistant for Bashir Ahmad, the first Muslim and second generation immigrant elected to the Scottish Parliament. Yousaf was appointed first minister on March 29th, 2023, becoming the youngest person, the first Scottish Asian, and the first Muslim to serve in office. Here's what he said back in 2020 when he was justice minister of Scotland, shaming the nation for white people holding the major leadership positions in Scotland. Every High Court judge white, the Lord Advocate white, the Solicitor General white, the Chief Constable white, every Deputy Chief Constable white, every Assistant Chief Constable white, the head of the Law Society white, the head of the Faculty of Advocates white, every prison governor white, and not just justice, the Chief Medical Officer white, the Chief Nursing Officer white, the Chief Veterinary Officer white, the Chief Social Work Advisor white, almost every trade union in this country headed by people who are white. In the Scottish government, every Director General is white.

Every chair of every public body is white. Again, this is the man, a Muslim man, who holds the highest political position in Scotland, an historic Christian country and white country. I've never heard him say anything about Gaza, where his wife's in-laws live, shaming them for having Arabs and Muslims as leaders of that territory. But this is not merely the result of welcoming in Muslim immigrants who oppose your nation's values. Because at this point, at least in Scotland, there wouldn't be enough of them to elect someone like this to the highest office in Scotland. This is even more about the loss of a biblical worldview in this once Christian nation of Scotland, once known for the great reformer John Knox and the many martyrs who died standing against the Roman Catholic Church and state religion.

This is actually the self-destructive effect of critical race theory, or Marxism, of the elite Scots who believe the lie that they are white Christian oppressors and to atone for that, they must implement diversity, equity and inclusion, multiculturalism and other humanistic ideologies, and therefore have non-Christian, non-whites rule over them and shame them, as their first minister did back in 2020. Alex, I want to talk about one other pillar of society that if it doesn't operate right, well, what kind of country do you really have? The election system and the justice system. Recently, it just came out that an attorney, and I'll just read the article from Fox here, says on Tuesday, Jenna Ellis, who's well known in the Christian community, she's a Christian, she actually represented John MacArthur, in their case against the, I think it was the county of Los Angeles, as they tried to shut that church down, but she also represented former President Donald Trump in the election contest, saying that the election wasn't free and fair. According to this article, Jenna Ellis' attorneys informed Judge Scott McAfee that Ellis intended to plead guilty what she did do to aiding and abetting false statements in writing, and both were present in a courtroom hearing when a teary-eyed Ellis read from a prepared type statement admitting her fault. She said, quote, As an attorney who is also a Christian, I take my responsibilities as a lawyer very seriously, and I endeavor to be a person of sound moral and ethical character in all my dealings. In the wake of the 2020 presidential election, I believe that challenging the results on behalf of President Trump should be pursued in a just and legal way.

One more paragraph. I endeavor to represent my client to the best of my ability, she continued, saying she worked closely with other lawyers who provided her with information that she then told the media, quote, What I did not do, but I should, Ellis said, was make sure the facts that the other lawyers alleged to be true were in fact true. In the frenetic pace of attempting to raise challenges to the election in several states, including Georgia, I failed to do my due diligence. She was charged with subsequently pleading guilty to a felony court of aiding and abetting false statements and writings. It carries a minimum of one year in prison as part of the plea deal because she pleaded guilty.

Ellis will have to serve five years probation and pay $5,000 in restitution to the Georgia secretary of state within 30 days. Alex, looking back at this time after the election, of course, no one has a handle on exactly what took place. But we looked at the discrepancies within the election, the number of votes that Joe Biden actually got that was the most in presidential history. We looked at other markers.

We saw the movie Two Thousand Mules by Dinesh D'Souza. And you put all these things together. And our conclusion was, well, you just can't be 100 percent sure. It just seems that the preponderance of evidence showed that this election may have been fraudulently won or tipped Biden's way because of lots of different factors. And yet we find this out that these attorneys and people involved with President Trump have all been indicted in Georgia and other places. And now four of them have admitted guilt, pleading guilty to, I guess, obstructing the truthfulness behind their claims of election fraud. I'm sure you have some thoughts about the last election. And then how do we interpret these plea deals in light of what we know took place or what we think could have taken place during the last election?

Yeah, this is a really important question, David, that touches on several issues that are critical for people to understand. And I'll start off by saying, first of all, I know some of these people who have been indicted. I know them personally.

I've known them for years. And so I have that additional complication there. What is happening is the justice system has been absolutely weaponized. And that's not just true at the federal level.

Unfortunately, that's true even in many Republican states, as we're seeing in Georgia right now. I believe this is a rogue prosecutor who is conspiring with other forces in Washington, D.C. and other places to infringe on the constitutionally protected rights of these so-called defendants. But the reality is, David, and some of these defendants will tell you this. They know that in this rigged system, when you have a jury pool that is 90 percent radicalized against Donald Trump, that it has been watching CNN and nothing but CNN or MSNBC or something like this, the chances of actually prevailing in a trial are very, very low. The same is true with juries in Washington, D.C. The same is true with juries in Manhattan. That's why I believe some of these jurisdictions were chosen to file these charges, because they knew that they could either get these people to plea out or they could get them convicted in a court case.

So this is very unfortunate. I do believe and I think the evidence is very clear and overwhelming. In fact, most Americans believe, if you look at the polling data, most Americans believe that the 2020 election was marred by fraud that affected the outcome.

So that's not a minority position. Most Americans believe that. And so do the people who were indicted in this case in Georgia. But the reality is they are being threatened. And this extends to criminal cases all across this country.

This is, I think, one of the biggest problems that has developed in our justice system, local, state and federal. These prosecutors are terrorizing defendants. They're telling them, look, if you don't take this deal, we're going to take this to trial and you're going to do 100 years in prison.

Your life is over. But if you plead guilty, we can do this the easy way and then you'll just pay a fine. And then that gives the media the opportunity to say, look, they played guilty.

See, we were right. And it gives the system what it needs, which is these guilty pleads so that they can modify and distort history going forward so that they can take out some of Donald Trump and others as closest allies. And it sends an incredible message to every other attorney, everybody else that may decide at some point in the future that they want to be involved in saving our country.

Look, if you try this, you're going to lose your law license. You may end up going to jail or having to plead guilty in a rigged case like this. So, you know, I think this is a terrible travesty.

What's happened? I don't blame Jenna Ellis for taking the plea deal in a situation like that. I think many of us would have done the same thing. Who among us can say, hey, that's all right, take me away from my family for 10 years, 20 years so that I don't have to plead guilty? It's impossible for us to cast judgment on her or the others who played guilty, Sidney Powell, et cetera, completely understand where they're coming from. And this is a deficiency in the legal system that has to be addressed.

We've got to get control of this before many, many more innocent people have their lives destroyed in this manner. So the left wins then. In other words, you're signing away that you were right. We were wrong. The election was truthful and fair.

And Biden is our legitimate president. There's nothing to see here. I guess it seems to me, if you don't think you did anything wrong, why would these people be pleading? I know why they're doing it to not have to go to jail.

But I can see that's a very tough situation to be in. But where does that leave the country when you do that? This is not just this case, David. This is happening every day in courtrooms all across America. Prosecutors are threatening defendants with massive jail sentences unless they take a plea deal. And so all across this country, we have enormous numbers of innocent people who are pleading guilty to charges because they know that the alternative is a very long jail sentence.

So we've got to get this under control. And this is at every level of government. It's at the federal, it's at the state and it's at the local. And unfortunately, it's not limited just to these cases here. Most of the cases you'll never read about. It's some kid that may have gotten scooped up on a minor drug charge or some person who may have been attacked on a minor tax charge. And even if they believe they're innocent, they're looking at this objectively and saying, I could spend $100,000 and still very likely spend the next 20 years in jail or I could plead guilty, get out with some probation, pay a few court costs and get back to my life.

It's a very simple decision for most people, even though they're not guilty. The alternative fighting this is unthinkable because the stakes are so high and we've got to stop this. That really seems like a sign of a decline and collapse of an empire when there's a two-tiered targeted justice system. Alex, just in the last couple of minutes we have here, looking at these various things we've discussed today, economics, military, immigration, societal division, elections and the justice system. These pillars that hold up a society and we see the cracks, the crumbling of the foundations here conclude our conversation today with an exhortation for Christians listening that we're called to be at peace. We're called to trust God. We're not called to live in fear of what's going to happen to our nation.

We know the nations come and go. What should Christians be thinking and doing in light of all that you've said today? Well, it's an excellent question, David, and I want to build on what you just said about fear. It is completely inappropriate for us to experience fear at this time. It's not unjustified, but God has not given us a spirit of fear. That's what we learn in 2 Timothy 1, verse 7. And the Bible repeatedly commands us not to have fear.

In fact, I preached a whole sermon on this one time. If you go to Numbers 13 and 14, you can get a sense of how God feels about fear among his people. He had just led them out of Egypt and they were scared of going in and doing what he had told them to do. Go take over this land and God literally ready to destroy his people over this. And so Moses intervenes and pleads with them and says, you know, God, please don't destroy your people.

All the Egyptians are going to look at that and say, look, he took them out of Egypt just to go destroy them in the desert. But God takes us really, really seriously. We must not succumb to a spirit of fear. We must be bold as a lion.

And so that, I think, is just absolutely critical. We need to understand that God is sovereign. God has all of it under control.

That doesn't mean life is going to be in this world, daisies and butterflies and rainbows. In fact, God promises us that if we live righteously in Christ Jesus, we shall be persecuted. But, you know, in this time, a lot of people are looking at prophecy. A lot of people are looking into eschatology.

And that's good. The Bible is filled with prophecy. The Bible is filled with information on where this is all going. So we should be studying that. But one thing that I have found so commonly in the church in the United States is this consistent pessimism that, oh, the Antichrist and oh, the satanic one world government and the mark of the beast. What are we going to do?

And I understand that and I sympathize with that. But we need to look a little bit past that. Right. We know what's coming after that. We know that Jesus Christ is going to return. We know that he is going to come with a sword. He is going to crush the evil that has proliferated. We know that he's going to make his enemies into a footstool. And we know that the gates of hell are never going to prevail against the church. The apostle Paul says in Romans 16, the God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. And that was applicable back then. If you learn about how the gospel spread through the pagan nations of Europe, the Middle East, even into Asia, what you see is God was taking down these strongholds, taking down these demonic powers and principalities as the gospel of Jesus Christ went forth.

And he's going to do it again. So we need to be encouraged, folks. We need to be of good cheer. We need to be doing what God has told us to do. And each of us has different talents, different skills, different areas where God has called us to serve. But we all have the same mission. We are to go out and make disciples of all nations. We are to baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. And we are to teach them to obey everything that he commanded us.

And folks, you know, just look past the immediate future. God is already victorious. Satan is already defeated. And so we just need to do what we're called to do. The battle doesn't depend on what we do.

The battle doesn't depend on our efforts. And thank God for that. God's got it all under control. We just need to do our part as he leads us.

Yeah. And Alex, we appreciate that you're doing your part with all the ways you're informing people about what is going on in the world. We appreciate the gifts that you're using in all these various ways. So thank you for coming on the Christian Real View today. All of God's peace and grace to you and your family and all you're doing at Liberty Sentinel Media. Thank you for coming on the program. Thank you so much for having me, David. It's really an honor and a pleasure. Thank you for what you are doing. God bless you and your family and all the listeners. God bless you and be encouraged. God's got it.

He certainly does. All right, we'll take a brief pause to tell you about some ministry resources. And when we return, we'll talk about Israel. Much more coming up on the Christian Real View radio program.

I'm David Wheaton. God's truth is enduringly true throughout all the generations. It transcends culture. The church is always going to be an embattled people. If it's swimming with the tide, it's not being the Church of Jesus Christ.

Look to the past, learn from the past, because the whole world lies in the power of the evil one. That was from the just released documentary The Essential Church, which chronicles how three churches followed God's command to gather during the pandemic rather than comply with arbitrary government mandates. Normal retail is $12.99 plus shipping for this two hour film. For a limited time, you can order the DVD for a donation of any amount to the Christian Real View.

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Who could be better for us? What does he then explain? That was Pastor Costi Hinn, who was raised in and then saved from the distortions of the Holy Spirit that are so prevalent today. Costi's new book, Knowing the Spirit, Who He Is, What He Does, and How He Can Transform Your Christian Life, graciously clarifies truth from error and is available for a donation of any amount to the Christian Real View. To order this 261-page softcover book that retails for $19.99, go to thechristianrealview.org or call toll free 1-888-646-2233 or write to Box 401 Excelsior, Minnesota 55331. Welcome back to the Christian Real View.

I'm David Wheaton. Be sure to visit our website, thechristianrealview.org, where you can subscribe to our free weekly email and annual print letter, order resources for adults and children, and support the ministry. In this final segment, Chris Katolka, radio host of Friends of Israel Gospel Ministry, joins us to correct the misinformation and disinformation about Israel that is so prevalent today and how God is keeping His promises despite a Jewish people who currently mostly reject Him.

Chris, let's start off with a foundational point of history. Could you walk us through some of the most significant events for the modern-day State of Israel and also mentioning some of the most common misconceptions? Even today with what's going on with the war between Israel and Hamas and the rise of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, which is the hatred of the State of Israel, one of the things that you're seeing a lot of is these signs that say Israel is a bunch of colonialists.

They're colonialists trying to kick the Palestinians out of the land. Well, I just want to remind the listeners that really the Jewish people have been present in the Holy Land dating back to the times of Jesus. And even before, we have record of Jewish people being in the land as early as Joshua's time, just as the Bible had said.

And so it's really important to understand that they're not colonialists. The Jewish people wanted to return to the land for 2,000 years. There was always a remnant of Jewish people living in the land, but the idea of Jewish people coming back to live in the Holy Land from all over, that really happened in the mid-1850s and 1800s. When a man named Theodore Herzl, he really began the process of bringing back a call for the Jewish people to return because he saw the anti-Semitism rising in Europe as early as the 1800s. He actually saw the Holocaust coming. And so one of the major moments in Israel's pre-state history goes back to the time in the late 1800s when Theodore Herzl organized the first Zionist Congress when he gathered Jewish people and Christians from all over the world and said, we need to have a homeland in our ancient homeland, Israel.

Almost 50 years later, in 1947, the UN approved what was called the Partition Plan, UN 181. And they partitioned the land, a land for the Jewish people and a land for the Palestinians. And that is what gave way to Israel's independence in 1948. Those are very important moments in Israel's history leading up to their independence. But since then, they've been at war with the surrounding neighbors that they have. There's the independence war when they were outnumbered 10 to 1, outgunned 10 to 1, and yet they survived and thrived. In 1967, again, all of the nations surrounding them attempted to push them into the sea and once again outnumbered 10 to 1. They not only were able to win the six-day war in 1967, they actually acquired the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, what we know as the West Bank or what Jewish people in Israel called Judea Samaria, and the Golan Heights. They quadrupled the size of their country and they've been giving it back over time for land for peace. And then again, in 1973, the Yom Kippur War is another big one when Syria and Egypt again try to attack Israel.

But all along the way, they've been able to defeat their enemies, even when it seemed like they were bound to lose. And so those are kind of some very important moments along the way, plus the development of the state of Israel, the in-gathering of Jewish people coming back to the land. If you go back and look at the records of the population in the late 1800s, early 1900s, most of the Jewish people lived in Eastern Europe. Today, the majority of Jewish people live in Israel. There are about seven and a half million Jewish people who live in Israel today. And then the rest pretty much live in the United States. And then there's communities all throughout Europe and South America. And Canada, but there's been a massive migration that's happened in about 80 years time. And most of the Jewish people have returned to Israel.

Many of them are there. Chris Kotelka is our guest. He's the Friends of Israel Today radio host. You can find out more at our website, thechristianworldview.org. We have this ministry linked, or their direct website is FOI, as in friendsofisrael.org. You had mentioned about the world perception of Israel, Chris, and I'd like to read just a couple paragraphs from a column that you have in the Friends of Israel website. The article says, Palestinian supporters justify the more than 1000 murders of Hamas recently by citing a corrupted version of history that you just gave, in which Hamas is a righteous voice for oppressed Palestinians who have been trampled by the racist, apartheid state of Israel. Palestinian leaders have tried to brand Israel as a colonialist, as you just mentioned, an occupying force, leading people to believe they can enact social justice, and we've heard that word a lot in America, by persecuting the nation of Israel. Hamas attempts to make Palestinian terror synonymous with the US civil rights movement, creating a dangerous false equivalency that emboldens people with little knowledge of Israel to call for its annihilation.

We're seeing that all over America, college campuses, members of Congress, and so forth. Too many rebels without a cause, the article goes on to say, have foolishly hitched their wagon to the Palestinians, believing them to be enslaved to Israel. So they condemn Israel and praise terrorists, even when the facts that validate the Jewish state's justice are right in front of them.

It goes from an article off the Friends of Israel website. So some of these things being thrown out today tell a lie enough and people start to believe it, that Israel, the Jewish people are occupiers of Palestinian land, that Israel is an apartheid state, they're a colonialist power. They're committing genocide of Palestinians, the extinction of another people group.

There's a big narrative battle going on here, you see it all the time. And with regard to the most important issue, like whose land is it, Israel, of course, lays their claim on the land historically, the Palestinians and their supporters claim the land. This is not going to be resolved, Chris, with, you know, one side convincing the other of some historical argument as to who was at the land first and so forth. How do you reconcile this irreconcilable difference in whose land is it, and all these false claims made toward the nation of Israel? One of the misconceptions that people have, and they're taught this through their universities and colleges, which as we can see today as a result of the Israel Hamas war, is no help to the truth when it comes to Israel and the Jewish people. One of the things that they're teaching Israel is an apartheid state, and they oppress the Palestinians.

Well, they don't actually look at the statistics, and they don't look at the truth. You can't have a group of people like the Palestinians be claimed to be ethnically cleansed, as they like to say, when they're actually growing in number. You can't ethnically cleanse somebody when their population has grown significantly over the past several decades.

That's like actual numbers. When you look at what's going on in Gaza, it was not actually the way that Israel intended this all to be. You have to go back to what happened in 2005. The Palestinians have been screaming to create a state for themselves since the 1950s and 60s. And so what happens is they've been crying for their own statehood. Israel robbed us of statehood. Well, actually, Israel for several years had been offering a state to the Palestinians. If you go back to 1947, I told you about the partition plan of UN 181.

That was called a partition plan. It partitioned the land of Israel and gave a section of it to the Israelis, and it gave a section of it to the Palestinians. And what happened is the Israelis said, yes, we'll take it. The Palestinians and the Arab world said no. Well, that's the first time they turned down a Palestinian state.

The next time they did it was in 2000 when it was offered to them during the Bill Clinton administration. When they all came together, they're about to shake hands. It was Yasser Arafat, Ehud Barak and President Bill Clinton.

And what happened? Just as they were about to shake hands, Yasser Arafat said, we don't want this deal. And it shocked everybody. And then in 2008, Ehud Omar, the prime minister of Israel, was going to help develop a Palestinian state, nearly give all of the land, I think even East Jerusalem as a capital. And the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas said, no, thank you. And so it's not as though the Palestinians haven't had an opportunity to develop a state. In 2005, Ariel Sharon, the prime minister, wanted to give the Gaza Strip, which Israel controlled over to the Palestinians to build for themselves a state. And he did. He unilaterally ripped, I think, 8000 Israelis out of the Gaza Strip said, you have to leave your homes that you've lived in for nearly 40 years there and all of your economy and the jobs that you have.

You have to leave all that. We're going to move you somewhere else so that we can give this land to the Palestinians to create a state. Well, you know what happened when the Palestinians came in? They were given a key to a very lucrative business, a horticulture business, an agricultural business that the Israelis had built. They were given the key to be able to build something and to make a life for themselves and a state for themselves.

And what ended up happening? They burned it all to the ground. And then on top of that, they elected the Palestinians, elected Hamas to rule. Hamas didn't just come in and take control. They were elected by the Palestinians, a terrorist organization, to govern them.

So again, there is these misconceptions. There were no fences between Gaza and Israel prior 2005, 2006. There were no fences.

There were no border crossings. That happened because they elected Hamas as a governing body. It was a terrorist organization. And then they started launching rockets from Gaza into Israel.

And since 2006 until today, 25,000 plus rockets have been launched over. It's a misconception that the Palestinians are these abused people by the Israelis. In fact, Palestinians are treated much better in Israel and in the Palestinian territories than they are in their surrounding countries like Lebanon. Lebanon doesn't want Palestinians there. Syrians, they hate Palestinians. They've killed Palestinians. Down in Egypt, you ever notice they're not letting Palestinians just flow into Egypt. Egypt has their border cut off with Gaza because they don't want Palestinians in the Sinai Peninsula.

Why? You think that's where they might go? That's their brothers, their sisters. That's Muslims, their kin. But what happens is you begin to see that Israel is not really the apartheid state that the world claims them to be. Israel is a fabric of many different cultures, many different religions, many different ethnicities. You can't have an apartheid state when there's an Arab doctor that's treating a Jewish Israeli citizen or vice versa.

It just doesn't work that way. That's not called apartheid. Chris Kotelka with us today here on the Christian worldview radio program talking about the history of Israel, the battle over whose land is it and so forth. The UN Secretary General recently said this, that Israeli settlers are going off in there creating settlements or towns or villages in areas that don't belong to Israel. Could you clarify what takes place with these so-called settlers? This is the issue that comes down to another resolution that happened in the United Nations after the Six Day War in 1967.

It's Resolution 242. And it's a very interesting document that ultimately a lot of people misunderstand and misinterpret. Technically, Israel still has control of much of the West Bank, which is, like I said, they call Judea Samaria. And so they do have the ability to build whatever communities they want to build in those areas that are not Palestinian controlled. There are Palestinian controlled territories, which is a result of the Oslo peace agreements that happened in the early 1990s.

And so the Oslo accords gave the Palestinians the right to govern certain places. So like Bethlehem, for instance, is a completely controlled Palestinian territory. Hebron is a completely controlled Palestinian territory. Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, these are all Palestinian territories. This means Israelis are not allowed in. And you need to basically go through a border crossing.

If we're going to go to Bethlehem together on a tour, you have to basically go through a somewhat of a border crossing to get through into Bethlehem. The other areas that are not those Palestinian controlled areas are technically controlled by Israel. Some are controlled completely by Israel militarily and also in the way they govern.

And some are kind of a half situation. So in those areas, they do build. Western countries will speak into it and say you shouldn't do that. You're upsetting the Palestinians and maybe depending on who's president or prime minister will point the finger at Israel for building communities in the West Bank. But technically, they have the ability to do that. Now, what will happen is if there ever is a two state solution, those communities could end up on the chopping block and they'd have to move those Israelis out of those communities into areas of Israel.

But that's something to deal with later. I know the world is definitely concerned that the more settlements that they say it's settlements, they look like towns. That's what they are. They're not settlements. They're Israeli towns, but they can end up becoming an obstacle, they believe, for a two state solution. The real question is, too, David, is there a future for the two state solution?

And I would argue there isn't. Chris Kotelka of Friends of Israel Gospel Ministry will join us next week for part two as we discuss why there's so much anti-Semitism around the world. What are the ramifications of this war with regard to biblical prophecy? How Christians can bless the Jewish people, yet without ignoring their current rejection of the Messiah, Jesus Christ.

Remember how we concluded last week? Jesus calls believers to be at peace, despite the chaos and corruption in this world. To have this peace, you must be at peace with God through repenting of your sin and placing your faith in who Jesus Christ is and what he did on the cross to satisfy God's wrath and justice for your sin. If you've never put your faith in Christ, give us a call or go to our website and click on the page, What Must I Do to Be Saved? And once you are at peace with God through being born again, you can have the peace of God as you are transformed by the renewing of your mind through the power of God's word and his Holy Spirit guiding your thinking and living. Thank you for joining us today on the Christian Worldview radio program.

Until next time, think biblically, live accordingly and stand firm. The Christian Worldview is a listener-supported, non-profit radio ministry furnished by the Overcomer Foundation. To make a donation, become a Christian Worldview partner, order resources, subscribe to our free newsletter, or contact us, visit thechristianworldview.org, call 1-888-646-2233, or write to Box 401, Excelsior, Minnesota 554. Box 401, Excelsior, Minnesota 55331. Thanks for listening to the Christian Worldview.