Chapter seven of the book of Revelation, I got a quote from a song and two points for anyone who can tell me who wrote this song or what band did it. It's the end of the world as we know it. It's the end of the world as we know it. It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine. Who sang that? R.E.M. It's got all kinds of words in it, and the song is kind of a goofy song. I'm not even sure. It's just that refrain that sounds good and stuff like that. But I got a couple of verses where people are facing the end of their world, but didn't really take it all that seriously. One of them is from Ezekiel. It says this. The word of the Lord came to me saying, son of man, what is this proverb that your people have concerning the land of Israel saying, ah, the days are long and every vision fails? What they meant by that was we've been hearing for how long that God's going to bring judgment. It doesn't happen. All these windbags are telling us this stuff and it's never going to happen. Therefore, God says, thus you shall say, thus they will no longer use this proverb in Israel, but tell them the days draw near as well as the fulfillment of every vision. For there will no longer be any false vision or threatening divination or flattering divination within the house of Israel. For I, the Lord, will speak and whatever word I speak, I will perform and it will no longer be delayed. For in your day, O rebellious house, I will speak the word so as to perform it, declares the Lord. And then another one from 2 Peter says this, Know that first of all, in the last days, mockers will come, mocking and following after their own lusts, and saying, Where is the promise of his coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue the way they have since the beginning of creation. For when they maintain this, it escapes their notice that by the word of God, the heavens existed long ago, and the earth was formed out of water and by water, through which the world at that time was destroyed, being flooded with water. But by his word, the present heavens and earth are being reserved for fire, kept for the day of judgment of the ungodly. But do not let this fact escape your notice, beloved, that one day is like a thousand years to the Lord, and a thousand years is like a day. The Lord isn't slow about his promise, as some count slowness, but is patient towards you, not wishing for any to perish, but for all to come to repentance. You know, there's a verse in Ecclesiastes that says this. Because the execution of judgment does not come immediately afterwards, it says people give themselves fully to sin. In other words, they become convinced that if there is a God, he must approve of what I'm doing. I remember there was one guy, Robert Ingersoll. He was kind of the famous atheist of his time after the Civil War. He was a Civil War hero. But he would go around and he would taunt people who were Christians and he'd say things like this. He'd say, look, I'm going to give God five minutes to strike me dead. as proof that there is no God. Then he would just wait and wait and wait. Of course, that itself is kind of boring, but he's waiting and then finally five minutes have gone by and nothing's happened. There is no God. One person said in his response to it, he said, do you think he was going to wear out the patience of God in a mere five minutes? But the truth of the matter is, is eventually he died and he knows better now. So the scripture talks about this, but it says for believers, it's supposed to be different. It says, now as to the times and the epics, brethren, you have no need for anyone to write to you anything. For you yourselves know full well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. While people are saying peace and safety, then destruction will come upon them suddenly like a labor pains upon a woman with child. One of the questions we have to ask as we're going through this is, what does the scroll represent when it says that he breaks the seven seals on the scroll? Now some people say it probably just means fulfilled prophecy. It's the last of the prophecy to be fulfilled. And then go look to Daniel chapter 12 verses 8-9 where it says this, As for me, I heard, but could not understand. So I said, My Lord, What will be the outcome of these events? And he said, go your way, Daniel, for these words are concealed and sealed up until the end times. And so they say, well, maybe this is what we're talking about here in the book of Revelation. You have the seals being broken and now it's all being revealed. Or another possibility that some have suggested is that maybe this is the deed to the earth. So that in the ancient world, if you had a deed, you'd have it signed and it'd be sealed by a number of people. And it was an indication that all of them are witnesses to the fact that the property was deeded to you. And if you wanted to sell it to someone else, you had to have those seven original witnesses come back and do so. So Psalm 2, 7 and 9 says this though. This is God the Father speaking to the Son. He says, I will surely tell of the decree of the Lord. He said to me, you are my Son. Today I have begotten you. Ask of me and I will surely give you the nations as your inheritance and the very ends of the earth as your possession. You shall break them with a rod of iron. You shall shatter them like earthenware. Now, remember what the goals are for the seminar. It's to give you a broad outline of the events related to Jesus' return. Secondly, to encourage you to have a serious thought as to the claims that are made by Jesus. And finally, to prepare you for this coming day. Because I don't know when this is going to be. And I don't believe anyone else knows when it's going to be. I know this, though. We're 2,000 years closer than when Jesus first gave this. And one generation that thinks they're the last generation is going to find out they actually are. And maybe it'll be ours. Well, we've had, in the first part here, oh, I've got to read it. It says, Then I saw when the lamb broke one of the seven seals, and I heard one of the four living creatures saying with a loud voice, the voice of thunder, saying, Come. And I looked, and behold, a white horse, and he who sat on it had a bow, and a crown was given to him, and he went out conquering and to conquer. Now, does this kid look very dangerous? Is that a white horse? That's the best that I could get on that one. That one's a little scarier, isn't it? Well, the question comes up, who's on this white horse, or better yet, what does this white horse represent? And some would argue that this is actually Jesus. Where would they take that from the Book of Revelation? Where would they get the idea that Jesus is the one who's being spoken of here on a white horse? This is the interactive part. By the way, the one, oh, he's not here this week. The one guy who asked questions in the first five weeks, good for him, yeah. Why would they get this from the book of Revelation? Why would they think that this is Jesus? Because he is coming back on a white horse. So they say you find a white horse at the end, you find a white horse here, so it would be Jesus. Others say, no, it represents the progress of the gospel. What's the problem with that type of argumentation? What happens in the next three or four seals that are broken? Are they positive or negative? They're all negative, so you'd think it's likely that this is not that. Some say it's the spirit of conquest. That's a little bit better, but the reason I don't think that's the case is because the very next seal has to do with war, which is conquest. Some say it's Genghis Khan. Yeah. They say Genghis Khan because him and the hordes came across the Mongols and he was riding a horse. They were known for being horsemen. I mean, put yourself in that position. You're watching this guy conquer country after country after country, putting up with the biggest empire the world had ever seen at that point. And you think, well, maybe it's him. I think it's actually the Antichrist. And there's some things we're going to look at because we're going to do one whole week just on the issue of the Antichrist as we get a little bit farther into the Book of Revelation. Well, this is supposed to be someone who is a great conqueror. I think that's indicated by the fact that he goes out and says, conquering. Here's a passage from Daniel that says this. It says, in the latter period of their dominion, this would be the four kings that came out of Alexander's realm. When the wrongdoers have run their course, a king will arise, insolent and skilled and intrigued. And his power will be mighty, but not by his own power. And he will destroy to an extraordinary degree. And he will be successful and do as he pleases. He will destroy mighty men and the holy people. And through his shrewdness, he will make deceit a success by his influence. And he will make himself great in his own mind." Boy, we've got some people like that, don't we? And he will destroy many while they're at ease. That'd be kind of like peace and safety, right? but he will be broken without human agency. Now, a couple of things with this. I was just teaching this in a Bible study recently, and I suggested that the original application of this was to Antiochus Epiphany. He was a Seleucid king who ended up sacrificing a pig on the altar in Jerusalem. He persecuted the Jews. He burned all the Torah scrolls that he could. He forbid them to circumcise their children. And he was a descendant of one of the four generals that came out of Alexander's empire. But I argued when we got to that, that I think there's a dual fulfillment to this. There's the initial one that it fits, but I think it looks beyond it. And even in this passage, I think you can see some things. First of all, it says that he'll be mighty, but not by his own power. When you get later on in the book of Revelation, it talks about the beast, the Antichrist. It says his power and authority was given to him by the dragon. Also in this passage here, it talks about how he will oppose even the prince of princes. Well, that's hard to explain what that would be in Antiochus Day. But if it refers to the Antichrist at the end, the Prince of Princes is very similar to the King of Kings. And the other thing, too, is that it says he's broken without human agency. And later on in the book of Daniel, it talks about this one who comes from the east down into Egypt. And he becomes enraged and he turns back to destroy the holy people. And it says he meets his end in the land of Israel, in the beautiful land. Now, a lot of commentators say, well, that's still talking about Antiochus Epiphany. But the reason it can't be is because Antiochus Epiphany didn't die in Israel. He died on the other side of his empire in Bactria. So what I'm suggesting is, in the same way that Hitler's a type of the Antichrist, but he's not the Antichrist. Remember what John said? He said, you've heard it said, that Antichrist is coming into the world. But I tell you, even now, many Antichrists have gone into the world. So in other words, there is a final Antichrist, and yet there's others who act as Antichrists. There was a lot of people in World War II, they were absolutely convinced that Hitler was the Antichrist. Either Hitler or Mussolini, because Mussolini was from Rome. They said, it's a revived Roman Empire, so that must be who it is. And they had good reason to believe it. They weren't right, but they had reason to believe it. Who were some of those world conquerors in the past? Alexander the Great. Yes. I have some interesting things about Alexander here. I'll give you a couple of them. First of all, who was his tutor? Paul's not here, so not everybody is necessarily going to get this. Good guess. Aristotle was his tutor. So he got the best education he could at the time. Secondly, he never lost a battle. That's kind of like the 1972 Miami Dolphins. They went all the way to the Super Bowl and didn't lose. Was that the year they beat the Vikings? Everybody beat the Vikings, that's right. I'm from Minnesota, it's just painful. Rocky Marciano never lost a match. He retired as the champ. Unlike Muhammad Ali, who came back and got it again, and then lost it again, and got it again, lost it again. Here's another one. He named 70 cities after himself. Alexandria, Egypt, there's Alexandrias all over the place. By the way, George Foreman, another boxer, he named five of his sons George. And he named his daughter Georgette. So there you go. By the way, if you have time, go look up on YouTube and look for George Foreman's testimony, how he ended up getting saved. It's truly an amazing, amazing story. He used to be such an angry, mad man. And then after getting saved, he's all full of smiles. And God blessed him. He went back into boxing just because he was doing a youth center and he ran out of money. And his wife told him, he said, you know what? You've got to do something. So he went back to boxing. He won the championship 20 years after he had lost it, when he was like 44 years of age. You have a book on George? You and Big George are friends? But that's not where he made his money. Where did George Foreman make all his money? The grill, yes. Here's another one. He conquered an area from Europe to India in 14 years. And how about this one? I don't know if this is a true story or not, the Gordian knot. When he got to Lydia, there was a king there named Gordius. And there was this giant knot and you couldn't see where it started or where it ended. And there was always this promise to whoever could undo the knot that the gods would give him whatever. And Alexander came in after conquering and looked at it. He took his sword and he hacked it to bits and he says, so Alexander does with all knots. And another story I came across with him where there was a guy in his army who was not particularly brave. And the problem was that he had the name Alexander. And so Alexander brought him before him and he told him this. He said, look, either you fight, you change your name, or get out of my army. I think there's some pastors and some Christians for which that'd be good advice, wouldn't it? Either fight, change your name, don't call yourself a Christian, or get out of the ministry. Mystery of his death. At 33 years of age, he died. They're not sure whether he was poisoned. We're not sure whether he died of a brain hemorrhage or whatever it was. But they preserved his body in honey. Isn't that sweet? By the way, you ever notice that it doesn't matter how good a pun is, it's bad? Because nobody ever really laughs at puns. They just groan at them. And the other thing I have to say about him, though, is that Daniel the prophet wrote about him. Alright, who's our next guy? World conqueror. Attila the Hun. Some of you ladies who have daughters, would you want them coming home with this guy? Does he look like he's had a bath in a while? No, probably not. He lived from 406 to 453. That's when he reigned, at least. The Huns were expert horsemen. They think they came ultimately from Kazakhstan, but they swept through much of the Asian steppes and into Europe. He waged war against the Romans for his wife, who was the sister of the emperor. She wrote to him because she was afraid that they were going to make him marry someone else. And he was conquering, and she wrote to him saying, oh, come rescue. And he took it as a marriage proposal. So he married her. So there you go. All right, he lost only one battle, that was in 451, against the Visigoth Roman army. He died on his wedding night to another woman, a woman named Lydia. They think he died of a brain hemorrhage with a nosebleed. Either that or his wife killed him. Could be either. The other thing that's interesting are the Germans and the Austrians were known as Huns in World War I. So that was their insult. By the way, this guy here, mm, yeah. Genghis Khan. He had the largest land empire ever. He was responsible for the death of some 40 million people, and he reduced the Earth's population during his time by 11%. I'll give you another one here. Tamerlane. He had a vast empire that stretched across the Asian steppes. He was a military genius. He was responsible for the death of 17 million people. And listen to what his tomb read. It had these words on it. When I rise from the dead, the world shall tremble again. Thanks. Now the reason I bring that up, you know, Hitler and Napoleon would be two other world conquerors. The reason I bring this up is because the Bible seems to indicate that this final world conqueror will be more destructive than Genghis Khan, more stunning in his victories than Alexander, more hate-filled than Hitler. a skilled politician, a master of deception, he will be the embodiment of evil, and we learn later on that he's actually possessed by demons. Do you remember? It says that there were three spirits that came out of the beast, and the dragon, and the false prophet, and they looked like frogs. Well, if they're spirits, meaning evil spirits, the dragon, that's obviously Satan, but that means that there's two other demons, one that inhabits the Antichrist, and one that inhabits the false prophet. And so the next one, though, is the red horse. It says, When he broke the second seal, I heard the second living creature saying, Come. And another red horse went out, and to him who sat on it, it was granted to take peace from the earth, and the people would kill one another, but the large sword was given to him. So Russia right now is estimated to have 6,257 nuclear warheads. America has 5,044. So the Defense Department's budget this last year for 2024 was $842 billion. That's a lot of money. $113 billion went to Ukraine in a war that's gone on for how long now? The two years, three years? I think it's in the third year. Yeah. And there's a lot of people who have lost spouses and all of that. Some people support it. I understand why they do. But Putin said there's going to be lines drawn. And he said if you go past them, he would use nuclear weapons. I don't know if he's bluffing or not, but that's kind of a scary thing to do. The Iraq and Afghanistan war cost us $1.6 trillion. What ended up with Afghanistan? Pulled out. So what was accomplished? Not a whole lot. Iraq? You know, it's interesting with Saddam Hussein. You remember one of the reasons we invaded was because he would not let them inspect the nuclear facilities. Do you know why Saddam Hussein did not want them? Because they found out he didn't have any nuclear weapons. He wasn't even developing them at the time. The reason he didn't want them to know is because he didn't want the Iranians to know that he didn't have nuclear weapons, because that was the only thing that was keeping them from invading again. They fought a war between the two of them for, what, about nine or 10 years. I think they ended up with 500,000 people dying in those wars. Countries that have nuclear weapons besides the US and Russia are the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel. Now it's interesting because he talks about a fourth of the world. Now I don't know if that means power over a fourth of the world or if it was that a fourth of the world dies, but what's the population today? Because when you add up the numbers, it looks like somewhere in the neighborhood of about 45% of the world's population is going to die in this last period. You remember Jesus said it's going to be unparalleled as far as the destruction. He said, as a matter of fact, if God had not cut the days short, there would be no flesh that would survive this. I mean, the world's population right now is, what, 8 billion? Half of that would be, you know, 45% would be like 3.6 billion, something like that. That's a lot of people. That's a lot of people dying. That'd be many, many times what died in World War II. You know, by the way, you'll hear all the time, they'll say, oh, you know, wars are caused mainly by religion. Have you ever heard that before? Right, oh yeah, it's religion. If we got rid of that, we wouldn't have wars. You know, it's interesting. Phillips and Axelrod wrote the Encyclopedia of War. They said of the 1,763 wars recorded in history, only 123 have been about religion primarily. That's only 6.98% of them. Most of the wars are not fought over religious reasons. I'm not saying that they're not, but what I'm saying is that not the majority of them. I heard this quote somewhere. Peace is that glorious moment in history where everybody stops to reload at the same time. What wars are going on right now that you know of? Armed conflicts. Israel, Ukraine. There's threats from China against Taiwan. They're kind of finishing that one on Afghanistan because they lost that. What's the first war that you remember that you actually lived through? Catch any of World War II? World War II? Korean War? Vietnam War? How many of the wars have we actually won in the last whatever? Not a whole lot of them. I don't think we've really, because Korea was to a standstill. And it is to this day. Vietnam we lost. You can say it any way you want, but when you're flying out and people are hanging off the bottom of your helicopter, kind of like we were in Afghanistan, you know we didn't win that war. How about these guys? I like this one. In 2003, Hatfields and McCoy's clan officially ended their feud. According to a Preaching Today article, the treaty calling for peace reads this, we do hereby and formally declare an official end to all hostilities implied, inferred, and real between the families, now and forevermore. We ask by God's grace and love that we will forever be remembered as those that bound together the hearts of two families to form a family of freedom in America. A number of them had become Christians by this time. Real Hatfield. By the way, this all started over whether one person, one of the Hatfields, stole one of McCoy's pigs or something like that. And there were, I don't know, like 30-some people who ended up dying during this, you know. It says, Real Hatfield, who first thought of the ceremony, said, we're not saying you don't have to fight, because sometimes you do have to fight, but you don't have to fight forever. Well, good for them. We know there's going to be peace someday when Jesus comes. Well, the third seal. It says this. It says, when he broke the third seal, I heard the third living creature saying, come. And I looked, and behold, a black horse. And he who sat upon it had a pair of scales in his hands. And I heard something like the voice at the center of the four living creatures saying, a quart of wheat for a denarius and three quarts of barley for a denarius, but do not damage the oil and the wine. I think that's kind of cryptic at the end. A denarius was a day's wages. And so basically what he's saying is you're going to pay a day's wages for a loaf of bread. If you buy some cheaper grain like barley, you could get maybe three loaves of bread for it. But I think when he says don't hurt the oil and the wine, I think the commentators are right to suggest that there's still going to be luxuries even at the same time that people are starving. I remember watching the series World at War. Some of you are familiar with that. It was a World War II documentary. And there's one where they're talking about this German officer in the siege of Stalingrad. And he ended up killing some people because they killed his dog and ate it, some of his own soldiers. I mean, he still had caviar and all the stuff he could eat, and 90,000 of them were starving, and so they surrendered to Stalin's group. By the way, can you see the one on the bottom there? Do you know what they're doing there? Looks like they're just playing blocks, right? What they're actually doing is they're playing with bills. That's Deutschmarks. It became so worthless that it didn't matter. Worst inflation in recent times was in Venezuela. It hit 1 million percent between 2017 and 2019. By the way, what's the official inflation rate for our country over the last year or so? Do you know? Roughly? I'd say it's about 9 percent. Now I want you guys to think, as you've gone to the grocery store, have you found that things have gone up about 9% over the last couple of years? No. No, the real inflation rate has been running about 15% a year. A lot of things that we used to buy just a few years ago are three times the amount now. And you know, they always say, oh, it's because of those greedy grocery stores, there's shrink-flation and all that. Grocery stores make hardly any money. The profit margins in a grocery store is about 3%. And so what happens is you just print up a lot of money. They sent us all those COVID checks, right? Well, when you increase the money supply by 40%, what has to happen to your money? It has to devalue by 40%. And that's what you're seeing. And so when they did the Inflation Reduction Act, that just spent a lot of money and caused inflation to go even higher. Hungary, after World War II, prices doubled every 15 hours. One dollar equaled 59 billion pangos. and a kilo of bread was 5.85 billion pangos. The new currency backed by a gold standard, when you turned in your old notes to get new ones, and they finally backed, and by the way, they took care of inflation in one year, because once it was backed by gold, then people weren't spending hand over fist. But at that time, you had to turn in 400 octillion pangos to get one new currency unit. I have one right here. This is from the Weimar Republic. It's a 20 mark bill, Deutschmark bill, and it's got a little stamp in the corner, and that stamp says one million. They didn't even print new bills, they just put stamps on them. I remember there was one lady. She had enough money saved when she retired. She was an older woman. She had enough money saved to buy a Swiss villa, which would be a house with like three stories. And even in Switzerland today, what happens is you have one family live here, you have the grandparents live there, and you have the kids. And so it would have been, I don't know, millions of dollars today. But she had that much money saved. Once the hyperinflation started, within a year and a half, that same amount of money would buy one postage stamp. So all the middle class, basically everybody was wiped out. And once they were, and Hitler came along and said, look, we can get the trains to run again. We're going to make Germany strong again. One guy I was listening to, he said, look, he said, at that time, you didn't have food to eat. When Hitler came along and said he had to have bread for everyone, he said, you don't know what that was like for us to hear that. I don't think it would be impossible to have a collapse. I mean, what's our national debt at right now? By the way, it's like, oh, I come to this seminar for you to make me really Thirty-five trillion. Wow. We're paying a trillion dollars a year on interest. I'm going to tell you something. There's only one of three ways that you can deal with a debt like that. You can pay it off, honestly, which would require cutting the budget by about 70 to 80 percent and then sticking with it for a long time. Is that going to happen? No. All right. Second possibility is you just repudiate the debt. You just say, we're not paying this. And so if you have 401ks that have bonds in it and all that, they're just worthless. It's not likely they're going to do that. The third option is you just print money to cover it. That's probably the option they're going to go with. There is no other option besides that. And it's not like, I mean, whether you're a Democrat or Republican or whoever you support, do you hear anyone in Congress that's talking about the need to cut spending massively? They're just talking about different things they want to spend the money on. No one's talking about cutting it. They haven't talked about that for years. So, yeah, Germany. Next one, famine. Bill Gates, this is according to Popular Mechanics of all, Bill Gates owns a ton of farmland, they say, in the United States, as in about 270,000 acres. That makes him the largest landowner in the United States. Why do you think he's buying all that land? He's not farming it. Why do you think he's buying that? Is it like a nature preserve or something? You want some place to graze his cattle? What? Cause food shortages. Yeah. I think it is. I think it's likely. Because you know there's the big thing. We really believe that the biggest threat to the world today is cows farting. That's what they're telling us, right? So we've got to get rid of beef because the cow's flatulence is causing the global warming to go up. Did you know if you go back in history to about the year 7800 or so, that they were farming in Greenland at the time? We've had global warming before. Now, how much of this is natural? How much of it is being honestly reported? I mean, think about it. You get paid a lot of money to be one of the think groups who deal with this issue. If you say there's no global warming, then what happens? You lose your funding. So you have a vested interest in doing this. By the way, the one before on the bottom, I have the wrong tag for it, but those are the farmers who are protesting in the Netherlands. Because what they do is they say, look, you're producing too much methane, too much of this. And so what they're doing is they're forcing the farmers to sell off their land because they have to pay these big fines. And then they're bringing immigrants in to settle the land. They want to reduce it by 30%. Reduce it by 30%. Farming. And you know they're big into us eating bugs now. You know that, right? Just think about that. Where are you going to get enough crickets to eat? But they're not kidding about this. You've got these people, you know, go vegan or we die. End all oppression. The Bible has something to say about people who push this kind of stuff. But the Spirit explicitly says that in the latter times, some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons by means of hypocrisy of liars, seared in their own conscience as with a branding iron. Now listen to what they advocate. Men who forbid marriage and advocate abstaining from foods which God has created to be gratefully shared by those who believe and know the truth. For everything God has created is good. And nothing is to be rejected if received with gratitude, for it's sanctified by means of the Word of God and prayer. What does PETA stand for, the organization? What does that letter stand for? No, it's people eating tasty animals. PETA bread? Yes, yes, that's right too. But notice, and you get some of this stuff where It's really kind of a romantic movement, which is, let's get back to the time before the fall. And so you get people who are very much into vegetarianism and veganism. They're often into nudism. They're often into health things, and we've got to be free. Get back to where we once belonged. And by the way, did you know Do you know there was a group that moved from Germany that was into all these type of things, right? They were radicals. And they moved out of Germany during the time of the Weimar Republic, and they settled in an area called Southern California. They became known as the hippies. The hippies were actually German transplants to America, because that's where all the radical stuff went on. The next horse is the black horse. Is that the black horse? No, that's the next horse. Yeah, this one here. It says, When the Lamb broke the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the four living creatures saying, Come and behold an ashen horse. And he who sat upon it, his name was Death, and Hades followed him. Authority was given to them over a fourth of the earth to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and with wild beasts on the earth. They actually used to wear masks like that during the Middle Ages. I'm not sure what the point was. I don't know if they're supposed to scare it off or whatever. You know, one of the things they thought with the Black Death was they thought that a bubonic plague, they thought it was actually carried by cats. So they killed all the cats. What was actually carrying the Rats. So that means it went up, increased. And by the way, one of the reasons they blamed the Jews for this was because Jews had better hygiene than the average people of the time. And so they weren't getting sick at the same rate, so they thought, oh, they must have been poisoning the wells and all that kind of stuff. The Black Death was a bubonic plague pandemic that killed 75 to 200 million people. A third of the population of Germany died at that time. And people thought about death all the time. A lot of the hymns that were written at that time were pretty dark hymns. And you can imagine how they felt about it. Spanish flu. 1918 to 1920. Estimated number of deaths, 17 to 20 million people. I did a funeral for a lady quite a few years ago, and I found out at the funeral that Spanish flu had hit her mom and dad's house and the family years before that. They lost six of the siblings and their mom within two weeks. How would you ever get over that? You know what's really weird about Spanish flu, though? What age group were the people who died the most? 18, 20 years old. Why would it be them? They're the healthiest people. just, what did you say, air quality and so on and so forth. It affected their lungs and they had low immunity because they weren't exposed to a lot of things on the farm that The other thing that's really weird about it was if you were healthier, it hit you harder because your immune system reacted to it. And those who actually didn't have as good immune systems, they were the ones who got through it. So kids got through it and old people got through it. It was primarily the younger people who died. They don't know for sure where it started. They think it started in Turkey, but somehow it got called Spanish flu. How about this guy? Mr. Science. Gain of function. My personal opinion, he's one of the biggest perpetrators of crimes against humanity in the last 100 years. I personally know people who've died after getting the shot. And whether you got a shot or not, a lot of people were pressured. A lot of people were fired. They were told that if you didn't get the shot, you're out of a job. And it hadn't been tested. Pharmaceutical companies didn't want to release their data on it. They got a court case that they forced them to. They wanted to release it over 75 years. Found out that they knew that there was all kinds of reactions to this. Dina, didn't you have a friend? And we don't know for sure it was from this, but she ended up with what? Yes. There was a lady I used to work with at the dairy. Her name was Shelly. She knew some people over from Wolf Creek where she grew up. It was a woman who was, I think, in her early 80s or something like that. And then there were her two sons. The two sons brought her in to get a shot. And they're like, well, you should get them here while you're here as well. We're young. No, no, you should get them. She got the shot. I think all three of them were dead in two weeks. Is that a chance thing? How many athletes have been dropping dead on the field? Have you noticed something now when they list people who die who are well-known people and all that kind of stuff? Almost never do they give the cause of death anymore. Now, granted, it could be because they died of suicide, it could be they died of a drug overdose, or maybe they haven't done an autopsy yet, but it's not coming out because they don't want it to come out. It's labeled as sudden adult death syndrome. Yeah. Now it's interesting because it's also come out, because he said, no, we weren't doing gain of function. Gain of function is where you take a virus and you cross it or manipulate it in some way to make it more transmittable. The idea is if we make it more transmittable, then if it happens in nature, we'll have some kind of a vaccine in order to stop it. But these are things that don't happen in nature. But what they have is, you know, I mean, one of the companies was actually set up by the CIA, right? And they made $80 billion. This is the first product they've ever had. Now, that money's going somewhere. Who's getting the money? Follow the cash. That's what they always say. And by the way, they've got more things in line, don't they? What about this one? Monkeypox. Who gets monkeypox? Monkeys? It's the monkeys, you nut! It's primarily homosexual men. And it has to be close body contact. You're not going to get it by sitting in a seat somebody sat or anything like that. They're working on gain-of-function for this as well. They said they've already got a vaccine ready to go. They're trying to convince the US government to buy huge stockpiles of this in case it becomes an issue. Avian flu. We've got avian flu going on, and now it's crossed to the cows. That's what they say. And now two dairy workers have gotten it. When you read carefully, you find out they had a runny nose, and that was it. But now they're talking about the need to... How many birds have they killed for avian flu? Millions and millions and millions. One of the reasons that egg prices spiked when they did was because of that. Think about it, they would have an endless supply of money. Some of you are old enough to remember fuzz busters. Do you know what a fuzz buster is? A fuzz buster was you would buy it for your car and then when the cops are doing the radar, something goes off so you know. So the guy sold them, made all kinds of money. You know what he did next? He invented a different type of radar that the fuzz buster could not read. Do you know what he did after that? He went back and had a new fuzz buster that could read that one. That's brilliant, right? That's as good as the Pet Rocks that they were selling in the 70s, right? Don't you have a parallel here? If you can come up with a virus, and you say, oh, but we've got a vaccine for it, and it's only going to cost this amount of money. I've known a number of people who are hurt in that, and not just the ones who have lost jobs and stuff like that. But I've had some nieces. I had one niece who miscarried a short time after having it. Another niece, she had all kinds of arm paralysis problems for quite a while and all that. But you didn't get a choice on this one, did you? I said, you're going to do it, and that's all there is to it. So I personally, and it was a little bit different. We're in Wisconsin, and our Supreme Court fairly quickly shot down some of the things that the governor wanted to do. God bless him for it. But there were a lot of churches that closed up, not for a few weeks, not for a few months, but for up to a year and a half. There were people who died who couldn't have their loved ones come see them. Because what, you're afraid that they're going to get COVID? They're dying. I don't think we've gotten over that yet. I mean, do you still see people walking around with masks on? I saw one lady, my favorite was during this time, there was two people going down the freeway. They're going 75 miles an hour, they're on a motorcycle, and they're both wearing surgical masks. Neither of them have helmets on. I saw another one when I was in Madison. That's like Moscow of the East for us and all that kind of stuff. But I was there, there was a lady, she's sitting in a car by herself and she's got two masks on. And I'm thinking, what, are you going to infect yourself? No, here's the thing. I've got an aunt. I love my aunt dearly. Suzanne and I took her to my sister's house for a recent holiday. And she gets all the whatever shots they tell her because she just trusts people. And I don't know. I think it's sad. One of the other seals is, oh, I got to go back to this black horse thing, though. When he's talking about the ashen horse, one of the things he talks about is the wild beasts of the field also doing it, right? Killing them. Have any of you guys seen the movie Ghost in the Darkness? Are you familiar with that movie? Val Kilmer was in it. It's based on a true story. It was in Kenya, there were two maneless lions, male lions, that in a period of time where they were building, I don't know if they were building a rail line or whatever it was, these two lions attacked and killed and dragged off in the middle of the night something like 35 different people. and they set up perimeters around it and fires and the whole thing, it didn't matter. Because they would hear people screaming and they'd be dragging away in the middle of the night. When they finally killed it, the two of them, the one of them, they shot it something like 15 times before it died. I personally believe that they were demon possessed. And before you think that's silly, I mean, demons possess the pigs, right, in the story where Jesus had? And I have a theory on this. I cannot prove this from the Bible, but I am guessing that demons inhabit cats at a rate of 10 to 1 to dogs. What did they say? Maybe I've told you guys this before. But the difference between a cat and a dog? If you pet a dog, he looks at you, wags his tail, and says, you must be God. And if you pet a cat, it looks at you in person and says, I must be God. I'm not a cat fan, so there you go. For those of you who are, I'm sorry. Anyway. So one of the other seals, though, it says in the next seal, it says, When the Lamb broke the fifth seal, I saw underneath the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God and because of the testimony which they had maintained. And they cried out with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, will you refrain from judging and avenging our blood on those who dwell on the earth? And it was given to each of them, a white robe, and they were told that they should rest for a little while longer until a number of their fellow servants and their brethren who were to be martyred or killed, even as they had been, would be completed also. I think a couple of years ago they said, they estimated there's something like 90,000 Christians who are martyred. See if you can remember from the last time we were talking about this. What are some of the countries where Christians face the greatest persecution right now? What's that? Nigeria. They kidnap them, Boko Haram. What? North Korea. By the way, I don't know if you were here that day, but I said the North Dakota thing again and they all laughed and I explained why that's a funny thing. Kim Il-Jung of North Dakota and all the stuff he's done. Saudi Arabia, basically Muslim countries, but still in communist countries as well. This is what Paul wrote to the Romans. He said, for your sake, he's quoting from the Old Testament, for your sake we're being put to death all day long. We're to be considered as sheep to be slaughtered. But in all these things we are overwhelmingly conquer through him who loved us. For I'm convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor heights, nor depths, nor any other created thing will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. The last seal said, by the way, I mean, Paul told the Thessalonians, he said, look, when we were with you, we warned you ahead of time that you were going to be persecuted, that you're going to suffer. And he said it happened just like I said. And he wanted to, he sent Timothy because he wanted to find out, did the people hold on to their faith? And it came back that, no, they're still trusting in you, or trusting in the Lord, and they still think highly of you. And Paul said, oh man, now we really live. But Christians have to expect that there's going to be suffering. Now, we don't get a lot of it in the United States. yet. But have you noticed a growing antagonism towards Christianity and Christian ideas? What are some of the labels that are put on evangelical Christians today? What are the epithets that they give us? Conspiracy theorists, intolerant, homophobic, haters, I guess you can just go on and on and on. By the way, I remember there was a thread that was going through some kind of a thing for YouTube comments and whatnot. And I made the comment, I said, take the name Christian out and replace it with the word Jew. And we know where this is heading. I was just telling my wife, there's one I just watched where some guy, he said he was Asian, he looked like he was maybe from Korea or whatever, but he was standing next to a big truck that was a campaign for some Republican or whatever, and he knows the guy. And he was sitting there with two friends, and some guy came by and he just started yelling at him, screaming at him, swearing at him, and calling him all these horrible, horrible names. And he's like, what are you doing that for? He said, because you support Trump because I'm not even a Republican. But he just went on and on and on and on and on. And then he tells him that you're a hater. But he's calling them these names. Then he said, oh, I married a blankety blank Asian. Well, the guy said to him, he turned it back and made him a racist. He said, so you married him because you know those Asians are submissive women who will do whatever you want? Well, then he went ballistic. But what I'm saying, and then somebody made a comment underneath, they said this, they said, is it hard to believe that with the hatred that this guy showed in this video, that he would be in favor of putting his enemies in cattle cars and sending them off to camps? In Pakistan, you know, we're always, we're the threat, we're going to overturn the government, right? We're going to impose our views, right? What about Pakistan? They have no ability to do that. Why are they hated there? Why did they burn down their churches there? Why are they accused of blasphemy? There was one where they accused a kid of blasphemy. The kid had Down syndrome. They said he burned a Quran. Why did Jesus say we're hated? He said, if the world hates you, you know that it hated me before it hated you. If you're of the world, the world would love you as its own. But because you're not of the world, but because I chose you out of the world, for this reason the world hates you. Now, by the way, Peter tells us you've got to be careful so that you're not suffering for being a troublemaker. You don't get credit for that. I mean, if you're rude and obnoxious and all that kind of stuff, and people don't like you, don't say, oh, Jesus said we'd be persecuted. But on the other hand, if we're doing what we're supposed to, and people despise us for it, there's not much we can do about that. Pray for them. And I don't know, I think this was a story I was going to start telling, and I didn't. Joseph's on. was a Romanian pastor, and he was arrested by the communist government. They'd bring him in every weekend, even though he was a pastor, and then they'd beat him and send him home. You don't want to miss your job, right? He was really worried because he thought they were going to kill him. His wife tried to buck him up and give him good courage. She said, Joseph, you said you're going to die for your faith. Now go ahead and do it. Thanks, honey. So he goes in there one time, right? And he thinks this is it, right? But he really had been praying about it and the Lord had given him the strength and he went in there and he said, I just want you to know, Chris and I saw this guy, didn't we? He said, I just want you to know that whatever happens in the next hour, it's all been ordained by my God. He said, oh man, they beat me for that one. But when it came time, he thought they were going to kill him. They didn't. They decided to let him go, and the reason is because he had all kinds of audio tapes all over the country, and they knew that if they killed him, he would be a martyr, and that would make it even more likely to spread. And so they let him go. But one of the guys who had tortured him during this time called him into this office or whatever right before he let him go, and he said, Joseph, he said, you know, I've tortured a lot of men, and I can see the hatred in all their faces for me, and I understand why. Joseph, whenever I look in your face, all I ever see is love for me. I'm going to miss you terribly. Please pray for me." Isn't that not what Jesus means by overcoming evil with good? Aren't you victorious at that point? And later on, we're going to see, how did they overcome the beast, the Antichrist? By the word of their testimony, the blood of the lamb, and the fact that they didn't love their life until the end. Think about it, for the ones who are beheaded at that time, they're going to be back in another several months. Because, you know, you kill them, but you can't keep a good man down, I guess, and so they're coming back. And so your ultimate... One of my favorite philosophers is Janis Joplin. She has that line in the song, I think it was written by Kris Kristofferson, who just died, freedom's just another name for nothing left to lose. There was a guy that I read about. He had been a homosexual prostitute. And he ended up getting saved. And so what he was doing was he was working the streets, trying to convince prostitutes, both homosexuals and women, to give up their lifestyle. Well, you know, he was hated and hounded by the cops, by the authorities. I saw a program where they were discussing him. And both the conservatives and the liberals agreed that he was a despicable person. The only disagreement they had was whether he should be jailed again for it. But I saw an interview with him, and he said, look, they took my house. He said, I've lost everything. He said, I've been in prison already. He said, what else are they going to take from me? He said, I'm not going to stop. You see, once you don't have anything not to lose, then it doesn't matter. But if you give it up, they can't take it from you. Solzhenitsyn in his book, The Gulag Archipelago, he said, when you get arrested, when you're first come to get you to take you to the camps, he said, more than anything, you have to make up your mind that your life is over. That's it. Whatever you knew, whatever you had, whatever was in the past, it's all gone. It's dead to you and you're dead to them. He said, from this point on, the only thing that matters is you maintain your integrity. I read another book on the gulags where one of the people who went through it said, it was a giant moral test for us and 95% of us failed because you become just as vicious as animals, people turning on each other. You know, what's his name? Elie Wiesel, do you know that name? He wrote the book Knight. He was a Jewish guy who wrote about the Holocaust, about what happened with his father, big moving story, found out he fabricated a good portion of it. But you know what, in the midst of those, even those times, those of you who are familiar with The Hiding Place and Corrie Ten Boom, right? There is no Corrie Ten Boom story without the Holocaust. And really, you know, it's interesting, the hero of that story was not Corrie. It was her sister Betsy. She was the one who kept everyone going. And one time, Corrie was complaining, you know, what do we have to thank God for? And Betsy said, well, everything. And she said, well, what about the lice that we have? Well, what she found out later on is the reason the Nazi guards didn't come in and rape them is because they had lice and they didn't want to get lice from them. She said, yeah, Corey, we can be thankful for the lice. By the way, she led a number of Jewish people in the camp to the Lord before they died. Swing back to Solzhenitsyn. He was in the infirmary. Got to watch my time. I've got five minutes when we finish right on time because Jeff's here right on time. But he was in the infirmary. He had a doctor working on him. It was a Jewish doctor named Boris Kornfeld. And while he was there, he had become a Christian just about a year or so before that. And he was still excited about this, and he was telling this to Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn was raised Russian Orthodox, but he was an atheist at the time. And it was through his witness that he got saved in that night when he was talking to him, because he talked to him through the whole night. I think it was the next day or the day after Kornfeld was killed. Nobody would know about him except for Solzhenitsyn. But because he reached that one person, the effect that Solzhenitsyn had in writing this book and exposing communism for what it was was pretty great. I'm going to read two more things real quick. We're going to do this in five minutes and maybe coming back next time. Because here's what I want you to see. In chapter 7, it says, After this I saw four angels standing at the four corners of the earth, holding back the four winds of the earth, so that the wind would not blow on the earth or on the sea or on any tree. You'll have to excuse me, it's kind of dark up here. And I saw another angel ascending from the rising of the sun, having a seal of the living God, and cried out with a loud voice before angels to whom it was granted to harm the earth and the sea, saying, Do not harm the earth or the sea or the trees until we have sealed the bondservants of our God in the forehead. And then it gives a list of all the 12,000 from each of the tribes of Israel. Now some commentators say that that's just a representation of the church. I take it to mean that it's actually talking about Jewish people who are from those 12 tribes, who are somehow marked off by God. I don't even know if they're saved at this point yet, but they're going to make it through this time. They're still on the earth. The reason I believe that's not talking about the church is because the very next thing you read in chapter or verse nine is this, after these things, I looked and behold, a great multitude, which no one could count from every nation, and all tribes and peoples and tongues standing before the throne of the Lamb clothed in white robes with palm branches in their hands. And they cry out with a loud voice saying, salvation to our God who sits on the throne and to the lamb and all the angels who are standing around the throne and around the elders in front of the living creatures. They fell on their faces before the throne and worship God saying, amen, blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever. Then I asked one of the elders, And he answered saying, these who are clothed in white robes, who are they and where have they come from? I said, my Lord, you know. And he said to me, he said, these are the ones who come out of the great tribulation and they have washed their robes. made them white in the blood of the lamb. For this reason, they are before the throne of God and they serve him day and night in his temple. And he who sits on the throne has spread his tabernacle over them. They will hunger and thirst no longer. nor will the sun be down on them, nor will any heat. The Lamb, who is at the center of the throne, will be their shepherd, and He will guide them to springs of water, of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes." One of two things, that second group, I think is contrast to the Jews. These are the Gentiles. These Jewish ones that are among the elect, that are marked off to be preserved on the earth, are contrasted to the Gentiles from every tribe and tongue and nation, which is evidently the Church. Now here's what's interesting. Is this talking about those who come out of the Great Tribulation because they're slain? Right before this, they're talking about the martyrs. Or is it possible this is actually where the rapture occurs? One way or another, it says that these people here, they're done with this now. These are in heaven. They don't have to worry about this anymore. As a result of it, they're protected by God. And then they go into the trumpets afterwards, and then the wrath starts to be poured out. Oh, I've got to leave two minutes for questions. Do you have any questions? Hmm. Don't you dislike the people that when they're teaching and they say, like, you have questions, and nobody really has any questions, but they keep asking and asking and asking? And then usually one person asks one question so that they can all get out of there. That's kind of like when they do in like a Baptist church or whatever, where they ask people to come forward, and they're singing Just As I Am, and they play it again. Anyone who wants to come forward? And finally, there's one old lady who feels bad for everyone else, so she gets up and gives her life to the Lord for the 28th time just so that everybody can get out of there. Well, I don't know. Do you have any questions? Well, then I'm going to hum just as I am for three or four more times. What we're going to talk about next week then are the trumpets, and then the week after we're going to get into the Antichrist. And I'm going to make a suggestion that the Antichrist is actually going to come out of the Middle East, not out of Europe, and that he's going to be an ethnic Assyrian. And I think I can show that from the scripture. And so that's a little bit different than what a lot of commentators would take from it. But obviously the point that's being made so far here is these things here, most of them are coming out of human sin, aren't they? Because you've got some kind of a world leader, out of that comes war, out of that comes famine, and pestilence, and death, and Hades. This is just the outworking of sin. By the way, we're seeing that in our culture today too, right? Depending on how this election goes, look at California, that's going to be the entire United States. Because there's people fleeing from California right now, right? To go to places elsewhere. What happens when you can't flee? Because that's the entire United States. You know, they always say, oh, this is the most important election. I think it is. I know this. Because they always rip on Christians. They say, oh, you guys think that God put Donald Trump in office. Yeah, and we think that God put Joe Biden in the office. We believe God is the one who raises up kings and lowers kings. That's nothing unusual. But where this is going, we don't know. We don't know. All right, I'm going to close with a word of prayer. It's 8 o'clock. We'll finish right now. Oh, Father God, you do want to pray for grace and mercy. These things are scary because the numbers that are involved, a quarter of the earth, the people that are going to die, all this kind of stuff. But every one of us is going to die at some point. And what matters is not if we die or when we die, but where we go when we die. And these here are going to be with Jesus. And for those of us who've trusted Him, we're going to the same place. And so we pray that you'd help us, Lord. In the meantime, we have to give a witness to the world. We have to be kind to people. We have to call people into your kingdom. And we pray that you'd give us many opportunities to tell people about Jesus. And then give us the joy of watching them get saved. Because you told us, your son did, that even the angels in heaven rejoice when one sinner repents. Well, considering that we're the ones who receive that salvation, we want to rejoice as well. So give us opportunities to witness the family members and friends and neighbors so that many will come to Christ. We ask in Jesus' name. Amen. All right. And you guys all found your way over here. Did anyone go to the other place first? We will be back at the other room.