Sound The Midnight Cry

"The Vampires Are Coming!"

Most of us learned about the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere when we studied early American history. It was the duty of the riders to warn of the coming British armies and prepare the Minutemen for battle. From that we learned of “the shot that was heard around the word” with the battle at Lexington and Concord. It was a battle to change the course of world history.

Today another battle is being unleashed—actually it is only another front of a battle that has been raging for thousands of years. Since the fall of mankind, the Incarnation of Jesus Christ and the victory of his death and resurrection over the enemy of God’s creation, Satan has unleashed the fury of darkness against every generation. And now, he has found a new avenue that is attracting many people but especially a following among young people. That path is one consisting of vampires and romance.

Author Stephenie Meyer’s four-book series, Twilight Saga (began in 2006) have sold 17 million copies, principally to pre-teen and teen girls, and spawned more than 350 fan sites online. All the books in the series follow a “forbidden fruit of love” theme between a human teenage girl (mortal) and a “vampire.” “Twilight” the movie released by Summit Entertainment with sequel #2 and #3 already in the works, grossed $70.6 million its first week.

The series is about an out of place sophomore teenage girl named Bella who moves to a new town and falls in love with a handsome 108 year old, but frozen at 17, “vampire” named Edward at her school. Edward and his “coven” of vampire family are vowed “good” and “vegetarian” vampires as they only feed on animal blood rather than human blood. Yet, Edward wants to eat Bella every time the sexual tension gets too high. He avoids having sex with her, not on any moral grounds, but out of fear lest he eat her and cause her to become the “un-dead” like him. But she loves him regardless and is willing to step into his “eternity” no matter the cost!

As pitiful as the story sounds, the real surprise is that many Christians are attracted to this spiritually impaired romance and are attempting to give Christian applications to its demonic basis suggesting this be acceptable “Christian” discussion. Some Christian reviewers on Christian Internet sites are using the story to initiate Bible “studies” and discussion on so-called “Christian” principles to be drawn from it. Even Focus on the Family stated, “Family is a big part of what nurtures Twilight's love. Edward's coven—family—of vampires is a loving one. Each member is committed to protecting the others, even Bella when she becomes part of them through her relationship with Edward…within the context of a monster mash such as this, we can see a reflection of the Christian calling to put away the old man of sin and embrace the new one.” [How can a Christian compare the vampire’s struggle to hold back his desire to devour his young lover and drink her blood to the transformational power of the Lord Jesus Christ!]

Scripture warns us not to call evil good and says, “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death.” The book series and its movie create the pagan illusion that there is a good side to darkness and it is OK to be part of the “white” side. The Apostle Paul admonished us, “…Satan himself transforms himself into an angel of light…”

It’s time for Christians to wakeup to the battle they are engaged in for their soul. This “monster mash” is for real and the stakes are eternal!

“14-0”

The number 14-0 conjures up a lot of ideas:

• The record of a winning team
• A shutout ball game

However, this time, 14-0 represents something else—it was the vote this week of the UN Security Council resolution against Israel and the events involving the area called Gaza.

The resolution “stresses the urgency of and calls for an immediate, durable and fully respected cease-fire, leading to the full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza.”

In Israel's first official response to the U.N. Security Council resolution, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office said Israel “has never agreed to let an external body decide its right to protect the security of its citizens.”

A Hamas spokesman said the Islamic militant group “is not interested” in the cease-fire because it was not consulted and the resolution did not meet its minimum demands.

When I first saw the headline, I wondered how it was that the vote was 14-0 as the U.S. has a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council. To my surprise, the resolution was approved Thursday night with the United States abstaining. Talk about feeling alone and isolated.

The media has portrayed the events over the past two weeks as Israel beating up a defenseless group of people made up of mostly civilians. Yet, they have failed to convey the fact that Hamas has been firing rockets into Israel for over six months.  [Fact is that Hamas has launched more than 6,000 rockets into Israel since 2005]. They overlook the fact that they fire rockets from civilian neighborhoods, mosques, schools and then scream when Israel hits back.

Pat Buchanan even took Israel to task this week stating, “The Israelis have been hit for six months with these little rockets that didn't kill anybody…they triggered a blitzkrieg [a Nazi term] against the Palestinians in Gaza, which in my judgment is an Israeli concentration camp…and the innocent people in Gaza are the ones suffering.”

It seems that the world has lost sight that Israel didn’t start this Gaza action until months of their people living in terror of rockets falling on their homes, schools and hospitals. For the past 60 years they have been surrounded by people that want to “wipe them from the face of the earth.” This past week, a leading Egyptian cleric restated the sentiment: "We say to you: Dispatch those sons of apes and pigs to the hellfire, on the wings of the Qassam rockets.”

So the world lines up against this tiny nation not much bigger than Houston, Texas. However, I’m reminded that the vote among the nations may be 14-0 [with the U.S. failing to make a stand], but there is one vote that has not been accounted for—that being God.

Exodus 6 – “…I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment. I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God…And I will bring you to the land I swore with uplifted hand to give to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob. I will give it to you as a possession. I am the LORD.’”

I believe that God is about to call for a “recount” and when it’s finished, the balance will have swung the other way. Why? Because God plus one always equals a majority!

"Into Thin Air"

The phrase “into thin air” appears to have actually been coined by Shakespeare. It refers to the idea of something vanishing without a trace.

The word “vanish” conjures up all kinds of ideas especially those related to illusions. For years, magicians would have someone step into a box and “presto”—they were gone. Over the past few years, we have seen illusions so spectacular that cars, airplanes and even the Statue of Liberty seemed to disappear without a trace.

This past week, the Chicago Tribune reported that a service outage affecting AT&T customers cut off wireless users across the Midwest all day Sunday. For a day, loved ones and friends “disappeared” because a wireless network went down.

If there was a thought that I would have to assign to the past year of 2008 it would be “vanishing into thin air”. It was a year that saw many things evaporate before our eyes.

• Retailers such as: Bombay Co., Sharper Image, Linens ‘N’ Things, Mervyn’s and others on the list of “stores that are no more.”
• Airlines from Aloha to Skybus were no longer flying among the clouds.
• Banks such as Washington Mutual and IndyMac are among the list of 25 banks that changed or closed overnight.
• Financial bulwarks like Bear Stearns and Lehman Bros. also met the fate of those that departed the scene in 2008. Awash in massive losses from toxic securities tied to subprime loans, before the government engineered a fire sale of the 85-year-old investment bank to JPMorgan Chase & Co. The credit crunch that paralyzed the world economy only got worse after Lehman Brothers, a 158-year old company that helped finance America's railroads, became the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. history.
• Personal wealth faded as trillions in 401k’s, IRA’s and stocks went down with a stock market plunge that rivaled the 1930’s.
• And if things couldn’t get worse, it was revealed in December that billions of dollars were wiped out in the Bernie Madoff Investment fund that proved to be a giant Ponzi scheme (pronounced “made-off” – am I the only one that finds that interesting).

2008 will go down as the year that much of the “free enterprise” system disappeared as the U.S. government had to step in to stop the systemic collapse of bond issuer AIG and the mortgage giants Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac. At the end of the year we also saw essentially the nationalization of the Big Three auto manufacturers.

The Federal Reserve has printed so much money and guaranteed so much debt that there are those that are now wondering if the U.S. will end up defaulting on its own debt payments.

This past week, Russian professor Igor Panarin, a former KGB analyst and dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry's academy for future diplomats, predicted the U.S. will fall apart and vanish as we know it in 2010. Mr. Panarin insists he does not dislike Americans. But he warns that the outlook for them is dire. “There's a 55-45% chance right now that disintegration will occur,” Though Russia would become more powerful on the global stage, he says, its economy would suffer because it currently depends heavily on the dollar and on trade with the U.S. Mr. Panarin suggests that mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation will trigger a civil war and the collapse of the dollar. 

So what will 2009 bring? What will disappear from the horizons in the coming year? I don’t know but I do know that the greatest vanishing act to ever be seen is not far away—the Rapture of the Church.

First Thessalonians 4:16-17 says, “For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.”

Now that’s a vanishing act that I’m looking forward to being in!

Have a blessed 2009!