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Control of Money
RV118-01© Berean Memorial Church of Irving, Texas, Inc. (1993)
We are studying the third seal in Revelation 6:5-6. This is segment number two. A mother of a Berean Christian Academy student, some months ago,
upon the insistence of her husband, removed her child from Berean Christian Academy. This same mother recently told us of her great distress over
having transferred her son to the local public school system. The reason was that the boy came home and said to her, "You can no longer spank me
because that is child abuse. My teacher at school has told me that if you do spank me, I am to tell her."
The distress of this mother was, in part, over the realization that she should not have moved her child into the public school system. She should
have kept him in the best school in the city. And worse, because of our policy that when people remove a child, the child is ineligible for return,
unless the removal has been for circumstances beyond the control of the family. So, now she knows that that child cannot even come back to Berean
Academy. Other children have taken that spot in the classroom, and others will not be denied what she did not receive, because she had the
misfortune to marry a husband who was beneath her spiritually, and did not have the vision, and did not have the understanding of what is taking
place in our society today. Only the lunatic masses of our society do not take seriously the entrenchment and the power of Satan's New Age movement
in the public school education with its fanatical devotion to the religion of humanism, and its virulent hatred of Christianity and all Christian
morality.
The apostle John in the book of the Revelation has been given a vision of what the world will be like once the Christians are removed from this
planet, and the New Age movement is in full operation. This removal of all born-again people will take place as per 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18. It
will usher in the seven-year tribulation era on earth known as Daniel's 70th week of years. During the tribulation, the predicted antichrist will
rise to power to rule on the basis of the principles of humanism. The New Age movement network of organizations, which are in existence today, will
begin functioning openly under the authority of the antichrist.
The Horses and their Riders
However, early in the tribulation, John is shown that Satan's false paradise will begin to come apart, and the world will be plunged into great
terror and suffering. The rider on the white horse symbolized a false peace under the power of the antichrist. The rider on the red horse
symbolized widespread homicide and warfare (shedding blood). The writer on the black horse, which we are now studying, symbolized enormous
inflation in the economy, and consequent shortages of food leading to famine. The scale balance which John saw held in the hand of the rider
signifies careful rationing of food supplies because they are in short supply. We heard that God the Father proclaimed the price control level,
which is eight times the normal cost of food. So, a day's wage (a "choinix"), that coin of the New Testament Roman era, would be required to buy
one (approximate) quart of wheat, or three quarts of barley. The inflation will reduce people to a bare existence, and hunger will begin taking its
toll. High prices for anything indicate a shortage of that commodity, indicating that something in the tribulation era is going to be inhibiting
the food production.
Oil and Wine
So, we pick up the record in Revelation 6:6. Having presented this dire picture of inflation; shortage of food; and, enormous cost to buy anything,
the final sentence says, "And see that you do not hurt the oil and the wine." The word "hurt" like this in the Greek Bible: "adikeo." This word
means "to damage." It has with it this negative "me," which means "do not damage." It connotes, in fact, no restrictions being placed on something.
That's the idea of "don't damage." It means "don't hinder it," or "don't restrain it in any way." This grammatically is in the aorist tense, which
indicates that it is at a point of scarcity of inflation in the tribulation society. When people are concerned with how they're going to make it
through the day with food, let alone through the week, at that point in time, there is the declaration that something is not to be hindered. The
active voice indicates that this is a direction to the rider not to allow this condition to exist. It is in the subjunctive mood, which tells us
that it's potential. In this case, he is not to permit something to happen to two basic items of the New Testament food chain.
One of these items was oil. The Greek word is "elaion." "Elaion" was a basic food substance in New Testament Times. This supply is not to be
diminished. Secondly, along with that, is wine ("oinos"). This was also a basic staple in New Testament times. It is not to be hindered. So,
here you have two things about which, suddenly, John hears them say, "Don't put any restriction on these." The oil and the wine were very
important items, and these are to be maintained.
We won't take time to read the Scriptures, but I'll just give them to you. In Bible times, oil, wine, and grains were the basic food substances.
That made up the basic staff of life for people. Therefore, these three are frequently brought together in Scripture. For example, you find these
in Deuteronomy 7:13; Deuteronomy 11:14; Deuteronomy 28:51; 2 Chronicles 32:28; Nehemiah 5:11; Hosea 2:8; Hosea 2:22; Joel 2:19; and, Haggai 1:11.
Many times, oil, wine, and barley (or wheat) are combined in an expression indicating a basic food supply. However, oil and wine are more costly
staples in times of inflation. When prices go up, oil and wine go up considerably. Consequently, what is a basic element of life in the way of
food now becomes, in fact, a luxury, and they become simply too expensive for people to buy. Possibly there will be some cheaper grades that people
could buy, but the quality items are no longer available to the masses.
So, the basic foods in the New Age tribulation, instead of being readily available to all, will become luxuries to those who are the rich and
powerful. Those unbelievers who enter the tribulation with the wisdom that the Bible says that you should exercise when you deal with money, and
those who have entered with some personal reserves of silver and gold will not be affected by the devastation of inflation. They will not be
affected by the devastation of the paper currency. Consequently, they will have something that will carry value by divine structure. This is the
way God built our universe, with silver and gold, throughout the Scripture, as the intrinsic value for economic exchange. People who have that will
still be able to pay the high prices, and they will be able to buy even the luxury items.
Hunger
But for the rest of the people, there's going to be the increasing terror of gnawing hunger – that pain in the stomach that never leaves
– 24 hours a day. The description of the agony of hunger in Charles Dickens's novel A Tale of Two Cities is a classic. It's a
description of the misery of the poor people of France preceding the French Revolution, and the smoldering resentment on the part of those poor
people toward the rich aristocracy. I want to read a portion of Charles Dickens' description of hunger. The context is an occasion upon which a
cast of wine has dropped off of a cart and has broken open so that the wine has spilled out into the streets. The poor people come from everywhere,
rushing into the street, and get down and start lapping up the wine like dogs because it is food. It is hunger stalking the French citizen.
Following that incident, Charles Dickens says, "And now that the clouds settle on St. Antoine, which a momentary gleam had driven from his sacred
countenance, the darkness of it was heavy. Cold; dirt; sickness; ignorance; and want were the lords in waiting on the priestly presence. Nobles of
great power, all of them, but most especially the last: samples of a people that had undergone a terrible grinding and regrinding in the mill, and
certainly not in the fabulous mill which ground old people young; shivered at every corner; passed in and out of every doorway; looked from every
window; and, fluttered in every vestige of a garment that the wind shook. The mill which had worked them down was the mill that grinds young people
old. The children had ancient faces and grave voices, and upon them, and upon the grown faces, and plowed into every furrow of age, and coming up
afresh was the sign: hunger. It was prevalent everywhere.
"Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses in the wretched clothing that hung upon poles and lines. Hunger was patched into them with straw and rag
and wood and paper. Hunger was repeated in every fragment of a small modicum of firewood that the man sawed off. Hunger stared down from the
smokeless chimneys, and started up from the filthy streets that had no offal among its refuse of anything to eat. Hunger was the inscription on the
baker's shelves, written in every small loaf of his scanty stock of bad bread; at the sausage shop, in every dead dog preparation that was offered
for sale. Hunger rattled its dry bones among the roasting chestnuts in the turned cylinder. Hunger was shred into atomics of farthing porridge of
husky chips of potato, fried with some reluctance drops of oil.
"Its abiding place was in all things fitted to it: a narrow, winding street full of offense and stench, with other narrow, winding streets
diverging; all people by rags and nightcaps, and all smelling of rags and nightcaps, and all visible things with a brooding look upon them that
looked ill. In the hunted air of the people there was yet some wild beast thought of the possibility of turning at bay. Depressed and slinking,
though they were, eyes of fire were not one thing among them; nor compressed lips, white with what they suppressed, nor foreheads knitted into the
likeness of the gallows rope they mused about enduring or inflicting.
"The trace signs (and they were almost as many as the shops) were all grim illustrations of want. The butcher and the porkman painted up only the
leanest scrags of meat; the baker, the coarsest of meager loaves. The people rudely pictured as drinking in the wine shops, croaked over their
scanty measures of thin wine and beer, and were glowingly confidential together. Nothing was represented in a flourishing condition, save tools and
weapons; but the cutler's knives and axes were sharp and bright; the smith's hammers were heavy; and, the gunmakers stock was murderous."
This is a very grim picture indeed of people in desperation. They are hungry, and they cannot do anything about it. This is represented by John in
the black horse, with its unrelenting agony of the want for food. Charles Dickens goes on, and he contrasts this dire, loathsome, stinking picture
of the agony of hunger with what the aristocrats were doing up there in King Louis XVI's court. Charles Dickens speaks about one of the great lords
of Louis court, Monsignor. Here's what he says about him. The contrast of the man who required an expensive ritual of servants just to indulge the
luxury of drinking a cup of chocolate, which was unheard of among the poor people.
Charles Dickens writes: "Monsignor, one of the great lords in power at the court, held his fortnightly reception in his grand hotel in Paris.
Monsignor was in his inner a room, his sanctuary of sanctuaries, the holiest of holiest, to the crowd of worshipers in the suite of rooms without.
Monsignor was about to take his chocolate. Monsignor could swallow a great many things with ease, and was, by some few sullen minds, supposed to be
rather rapidly swallowing France itself. But his morning's chocolate could not so much as get into the throat of Monsignor without the aid of four
strong men besides the cook. Yes, it took four men, all four ablaze with gorgeous decorations, and the chief of them unable to exist with fewer
than two gold watches in his pocket, emulative of the noble and chaste fashion set by Monsignor to conduct the happy chocolates to the Monsignor's
lips.
One lacquey carried the chocolate into the sacred presence. A second milled and frothed the chocolate with the little instrument he bore for that
function. A third presented the favorite napkin. A fourth, he of the two gold watches, poured the chocolate out. It was impossible for Monsignor to
dispense with one of these attendants on the chocolate, and hold his high place under the admiring heavens. Deep would have been the blot upon his
escutcheon if his chocolate had been ignobly waited on by only three men, and he must have died of two."
What a contrast! In the dirty streets, there was the agony of hunger; but, up in the palace, it took four men to bring the lord a proper cup of
chocolate. That's what John is talking about. In Revelation, the luxury foods are indulged at the same time that there is widespread physical
deterioration from malnutrition.
So, brings us to consider the economy of the tribulation. This is no secret. The New Age movement is making it very clear, on the principles of
the dogmas of humanism, what kind of an economy will exist once you irritating Christians, with your biblical view of free enterprise capitalism have
been removed from the scene. The principle will be that of socialism. The doctrines of humanism, which will be followed by the antichrist, call for
an economic system of socialism to replace free enterprise capitalism. Under socialism and communism, the citizens make the state their provider,
and are dependent upon a party of elite bureaucrats to make all the decisions for their welfare. The state is thus deified, and it exercises
absolute authority over the people in order to make them conform to the goal of what the elite leaders consider the general welfare.
Naive American political leaders today are still proclaiming to us that poverty causes communism and its accompanying violence. You have to
really be a dark-age, backward mentality to stand up and say, as one of the presidential candidates did the other day, that poverty is the cause
of communism. Uninformed people continue to cling to that delusion. They continue to cling to the delusion that communism is a working class
movement, and that it seeks to raise the living standards of the poor. The truth of the matter is, for anybody who has taken the trouble to
investigate, communism is an elitist movement. It is a movement carried forth by educated atheists who are propelled by the desire to exercise
complete power over a group of human beings as an elite minority, and to impose upon that citizenship a system of socialism, with the objective of
regenerating human nature.
That, of course, appeals to idealistic youth, and that's why so many young college people stumble foolishly into socialism and communism. That
certainly sounds attractive. It's a great ideal that one would want to see brought into existence. It is the people who are rich; it is the people
who are educated; and, it is the people who think that there is no God in the universe, and are atheists, who are the source of communism and of the
concept of socialism. The principle is to impose upon them power. That is the name of the game. That is the desire of the leadership – to have
power over human beings. That is what compels the antichrist.
Communism uses the issue of poverty of the working classes to gain control in the country, then to militarize that country; bring it under Russian
control; and, then to further isolate it, thereby to surround and to weaken the United States. This is what is happening, of course, in Central
America. Again, the benighted mentality of the politicians of our day is amazing. They do not understand that what is taking place in Central America
is another attempt to isolate and to surround the United States, and to place us nationally in mortal jeopardy.
Communists impose socialism with a brutal hand because they believe in evolution. Evolution means that man is evolving like any other animal.
And if you are a farmer, and you want to raise a good stock of cattle, what do you do? You cull out the diseased ones; you try to breed better
ones; and, you get rid of those that are undesirable for your objective. It doesn't matter to you how many of those cattle you shoot and kill and
slaughter. What are you interested in? It is not some individual piece of beef. What you are interested in is the whole herd. That's the way the
communists think. Unless you and I start thinking the way they do, we will not understand how justified they feel in slaughtering enormous numbers
of individuals because they are interested in the herd, and they are trying to make regenerated human beings. They feel no guilt for slaughtering
millions of people for the well-being of the group.
The Antichrist
The antichrist is going to be in this position. He's going to have total power to impose socialism on his domain. With the Christians removed from
the earth, the antichrist will be relieved of all that resistance that Christians bring. He will have absolute control under his state socialism.
He will have complete control of food' of energy; and, of money, and he will have a fully installed computer surveillance system on the daily
activities of the citizens. The antichrist will seemingly be in a position to make socialism work as it has never been able to work on the earth
before, and to realize the dream of the New Agers of peace, prosperity, and plenty for all. The antichrist is going to be fully in control, and
you must keep that in mind to see how humiliating the devastation is to him, and how humiliating it is to him when God devastates his paradise.
He is in control.
Revelation 13:16-17 make that clear. Speaking of the antichrist, we read, "And he causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and
enslaved, to receive a mark in their right hand or in their foreheads." The Greek word "in" there is "on" their right hand or "on" their foreheads:
"That no man might buy or sell, except that he had the mark or the name of the beast, and the number of his name. Then it goes on in verse 18, and
says, "Here is wisdom. Let him that has understanding count the number of the beast, for it is the number of man, and his number is 666." As you
know, that is a very sacred number in the New Age movement. The New Agers constantly tell their people, "Use the number 666 all that you can. It is
a sacred number that will draw tremendous power to you from outer space."
This man is going to be in charge. The technology for control of people is now available for the first time in human history. The Scripture tells
us that doesn't matter who you are or what your economic status is. You will have in your right hand a mark, or you will have it up here on your
forehead, and then you will be permitted to buy; to sell; simply to exist; or, to go to the grocery store. This man will have complete control.
Never in history of the world has that been possible until our day. These are fantastic times in which we live, and it does tell us how close indeed
must be the Lord's return.
Today, the world opinion makers, such as those who belong to the Council of Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, are programing people
to believe that the world's peace and prosperity is dependent upon a new international economic order. And the means for controlling such an order
in terms of using money (getting it) is now fully available. That technology is here. In other words, it is now possible to eliminate your privacy.
That's what we're talking about. If the antichrist is going to control what everybody does with his money, that means that you cannot have any
privacy in what you do with your money. Every nickel and every 35 cents that you throw into a Coke machine will be known, because the system will
be so absolutely accurately controlled.
Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT)
It will be a system with no cash and no checks – only computer transfers. The term is electronic funds transfer. The code for that is EFT.
When you see those letters, it stands for electronic funds transfer. It's a system in which the government holds all the money, and the citizen
holds only a mark that authorizes him, at the discretion of the government, for access to that money.
Credit Cards
Credit cards, therefore, are now, particularly since the early part of the 1980s, are being designed to become a device for exchanging value –
not for exchanging money. The credit card is being changed into a debit card. You may not have noticed (and you may want to go and check on this)
that the credit card that you now carry has a magnetic strip added to it. That magnetic strip, a half-inch by three inches long on your credit card,
can carry 100,000 words of information about the owner. It has information on it now. You can't read it, but the companies who issue it and the banks
can read it. It has certain information that they consider pertinent. Eventually, the information on this card will deal with your political views;
your religious beliefs; your financial transactions; your arrests; your credit rating; and, your physical features. It will have an enormous amount
of information on that little strip. That's why it's been placed on your credit card as the next step in moving from a society with money.
The first step will be to come up with a new kind of currency to get you into the psychological receptivity of changing money. Then it'll go
to where your credit card is not changing money – it's just depicting what you have in your account, and transferring it to some business
account via that little card. The gradual pressures are actually being forced upon people to get them away from using cash and checks. If you use
cash, you don't leave a trail of paper behind you. You maintain privacy. Now, there is legislation being proposed to eliminate the $100 bill. You
can't get $2 bills anymore. You can't get $1,000 bills. Those have been made illegal. Now they want to remove $100 bills to make it still harder
for people to have just cash money in large quantities. They want to reduce it to small denominations so that you would be faced with an enormous
amount of paper if you try to operate just from cash. The pressure is there now to dismiss with the $100 bill.
SWIFT
There is a bankers' organization called SWIFT. This stands for the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Transactions. This is a consortium of
European and American banks. Some of the SWIFT banks are now charging people a penalty if they pay for things with a check instead of their credit
cards. That's where the next pressure is going to be – to charge a penalty if you use checks instead of the card. This is to get you to take
one more step to use only the card. Americans are being acclimated, furthermore, to securing instant money by those 24-hour-a-day machines where
all you have to do is put in a card, and you get money out. I've never done that. I put several different kinds of cards in there, including my
Brigade Leader's card. I never get anything out of it. There is a system you have to know. But 24 hours a day, if you have the right card and you
have the right number, you can really check it out. Isn't that wonderful? Money from a machine. But what's it tied to? That little piece of plastic.
These are exciting days. You, of all believers in the body of Christ, are seeing the preparations for the antichrist's world. When you get to heaven,
all of those folks up there are going to ask you all about it, because they will not have your background information: "How come things can be
taking place on the earth while we're up there in the heavens following the rapture with the Lord?" They're going to wonder: "How can these things
take place during the tribulation?" And you will be able to explain that. You'll say, "I remember the Sunday morning when we talked about EFT and
SWIFT," and those people will think you're pretty bright after all.
In any case, the system is being pressed toward the card. It will give the antichrist what he needs to control everybody's buying and selling.
Americans are rushing madly to accept the new system and to welcome it.
The same system is now being tested also for a worldwide uniform identification card for doing business. They have a sample of that. It's a
worldwide ID card so that anywhere in the world, everybody is identified in the same way.
Universal Product Code (UPC)
You have probably noticed something on your packages. Let me tell you something interesting. You may not have observed. UPC is another acronym, and
it stands for Universal Product Code. It consists of those little black bars on all those things you buy at the grocery store now. This is a means
for clearly identifying every item, and it does so in a way that a machine can read the item for the ultimate purpose of Electronic Funds Transfer.
That's the purpose of the Universal Product Code that's on the packages of things you buy, so that eventually that can be used for a cashless
society to transfer funds. So, if somebody in a place of authority sends the word down and says, "Cancel that card," when it goes into the machine,
it will stop dead. The lady at the checkout counter will say, "I'm sorry, I can't sell you this. You don't have any funds to transfer. You're frozen.
Think how that will add to the hunger of the black horse era.
The system works like this. As you know, it has a series of bars, and it has numbers. It goes from, say, zero to four, or five to nine, in different
mixtures. These are read by an electronic scanner at the checkout stand. Actually, there are three sets of bars. They are in various combinations of
thickness of lines and combinations of lines that indicate a number. There are three different sets. Two sets go completely from zero to nine. Once
set goes: zero; four; five; six; and, nine. That is set number three. Sets number one and two go the whole gamut.
Here's what's interesting. You can go home this afternoon and check this out from something from your shelves. The product code design on the
package is divided in two. Bar set number one is always used on the left side of this division. That identifies the manufacturer. Bar set number
two is always used for the right side. That identifies the product. The thing that's interesting about this is that there is a double line (two
narrow, close, parallel lines) represent the number six in the number two set of symbols. There's a number one set of bar symbols including the
numbers from zero through nine. There is a number two set a bar symbols including numbers from zero through 9. In the number two set, this is what
the six looks like. You will notice that in all of your product codes, the outside is the number six, in the middle is the number six, and on the
other side is the number six. Isn't that interesting? 666.
This is the code identifying the control element of the antichrist. Whatever other significance it has, in the Universal Product Code, that is
included. Sometimes on your packages, you will see just half of this code. When it has that condition of just half, then it uses the number three
set of numbers. I'm not going to go into any more technicalities about that. But it's only half of this code. But it has the number six symbol from
the number two set of code markings on each side. Then, from the number three set, this is what number six is in the number three – just a
single straight line. If it's half, you will still find 666. I find that rather fascinating – that they go through the trouble to see that on
every mark, 666 is included, which the Scriptures tell us is the number that you should watch for which will have a special association with the
antichrist. It will be a control element.
Microchips
So, the Electronic Fund Transfer system is fully operational, except for this reason: not all businesses have yet installed scanners. They're very
expensive. When all businesses have scanners, then it will be very rapidly transferred electronically. And the government will outlaw paper money
and coins. You won't have anything except your card that you can do business with. At that point, nothing you do will be secret again. That will
enable the antichrist to control, in his paradise, all buying and selling. The technology of the Universal Product Code and the electronic scanners
has, furthermore, now been reduced to a microchip – a microchip the size of the lid in a pencil. All of the information that can be put on
that half-inch by three-inch magnetic strip that's on your credit card can be placed on this microchip – and more. It can include all kinds
of identifying control items, including a barcode-identifying mark for you.
Furthermore, this can be implanted under the skin with a little hypodermic type of gun. It can be painlessly shot in. Therefore, all you have to do
is walk by a checkout counter, and it'll scan you. It will read your number, and it'll know how to transfer funds from your account to some
business account. This is going to be the super control of the antichrist. It will probably a microchip. Every human being will be implanted with
a chip with Universal Product Code mark on that chip. I don't doubt that there can be a capacity to keep track of where that chip is going. They
do this with animals now. They implant these in animals, and then they have electronic ways of keeping track of where the animal goes; what his
eating habits are; what his habits are out in the forest; where he travels; what he does; and, so on. All of that is kept track of because they
implant him with one of these chips. It's easy to keep track of the rest of us.
Why would anybody want to do this? How could Americans be led to accept this? Well, some may be unbelievers, and because they are out of touch with
the Word of God; they don't know where history is moving; and they have no respect and appreciation for free-enterprise capitalism and the biblical
principle of privacy, they are ready to accept what is going to be presented as an improved way of doing things. Obviously, this can sure shoot the
Mafia out of the water, can't it? How can you handle all that drug money you get in? How can you launder all that money coming in when you have to
work from a card? Everybody says, "That's wonderful. Let's get it. I'd like to see how Lucky Luciano and his boys get it once and for all."
However, it's also going to get you. It's also going to get your personal privacy. Three basic reasons are now being proposed for a mark of
the microchip type instead of a card. One is the problem of losing or misplacing your card. Obviously, if it's implanted on you, you can't lose it
or misplace it. You can't lend it to a friend unless you cut your hand off. Otherwise, you can't lose it. Secondly, there's the problem of people
who are mentally-challenged or insane, who can't handle their cards. They need supervision. They go out and they buy stupid things like pink
Cadillacs. Well, you have to have some control so that these folks know what's good for them, and what they should spend their money on. Well, what
better than a little chip so that you know when they're trying to do something. The third reason is that the problem of people who are old and
senile, who forget their cards, and stand up in the grocery line and say, "Oh, I left it at home." Some of you do that with your wallet. You get
there, and you say, "Oh, I didn't bring any money with me." So, for you folks, what better to have it right there on you. We just implant it. So,
we remove that embarrassment. Of course, there's no paperwork either. So, if you look at your reserves and say, "Hey, the computer made a mistake,"
how are you going to prove it? The computer knows everything. That's going to be interesting as well.
You may be aware of the fact that in Brussels, Belgium, the European Economic Community (the ten-nation confederacy, which will be the base of
operation of the antichrist himself), they now have a three-story self-programming computer, and they've had it for several years. It's so
monstrous that they refer to it as "the beast." It is being designed to give a number to every human being on the face of the earth. It is now
being programed primarily for North American countries. I can tell you today that if you have a driver's license number; if you have a Social
Security number; or, if you have a credit card number, you're in "the beast." That has already been transferred and recorded, along with all
kinds of information. If you have a military record, or some other less desirable record, it'll be there on tap.
So, the antichrist is going to have a beautiful world. The Christians are going to be gone. Those irritating buzzwords are going to be out of the
way. They will have no more of their moralizing. The New Age movement network will all be in place, and they will all rise to follow the leader.
They will rally to his world based upon the dogmas of humanism and the principles of socialism. It will be viewed indeed as the first time in the
history of the world that there is an opportunity for a golden age to come. It will supposedly be an age where there is peace; where there is
prosperity; where there is no hunger; where there is no violence; and, where everybody has a life that is fulfilling.
However, the Lord Jesus has taken us into His confidence again, and He has told us how it is all going to work out. With all that enormous control,
Matthew 24:7 says that the antichrist's kingdom will be characterized by: "Nations rising against nation; kingdom against kingdom; and, there shall
be famines." Heavens to Betsy, there's the black horse. There shall be famines. Of course, when you have famine, then you have disease, because
people suffer from malnutrition; they become lethargic; and, they do not maintain sanitary conditions. So, the Lord says, "There shall be famines,
and that followed by pestilence, and then earthquakes in various places," as God begins exercising His wrath.
The Failure of Socialism
Socialism, while a noble ideal, therefore, never works in a society of people who are governed by the sin nature. The desire to get something for
nothing is inherent in the human race. Personal self-interest is the most powerful motivation for hard work and productivity. If you want to get
people to work hard, and you want to get them produce, then let the motivation be their self-interest, benefiting by the fruits of their labors.
Socialism takes away the fruits of one's labor, to distribute it to others, so as to keep everyone economically equal. That destroys the incentive
both to work and to produce, and it is against the Word of God. Thus, socialist countries never produce enough food to feed their citizens, and
they have to look to us capitalists to be able to get enough to feed their people.
There is an interesting observation from the desperation in Romania to deal with this very problem of a country whose people don't want to produce
food. I'm quoting from Dr. Fred Schwartz's April 15th "Christian and Anti-Communism Crusade" newsletter. He says, "The Achilles heel of communist
regimes is their inability to persuade their subjects to grow food. Communist Romania is suffering from a severe food shortage. There is
undernourishment in many rural districts, and many children suffer from diseases caused by malnutrition. The response of the communist authorities
is typical. It may be summed up: 'Force the farmers to grow more food.' Regulations have been introduced as follows.
"One: land will be taken from any
owner who does not put it to maximum use. Two: peasant households of two to three people owning up to seven-and-a-half acres of farmland must raise
at least one cow; two pigs; five sheep, or two goats; ten hens; 60 to 80 chickens; five to eight fowl (geese, ducks, or turkeys); and 10 to 15
rabbits; and, work animals. One beehive must be kept, and enough silkworms to deliver four to five kilograms of silk cocoons to the state. Three:
households of four to five people must raise at least three cows; and, those with more than seven-and-a-half acres of land must raise two cows and
at least ten sheep. The bigger the family, the larger the livestock quota. Four: fruit trees must be planted in gardens and varied bushes along
fence lines. Five: farm buildings must be at least two stories high.
"There is something bizarre about having to force farmers to grow food. That is like having to force a hungry boy to eat additional ice cream.
Most farmers are eager to grow all the crops and raise all the animals they can. All they need is to have a fair and free market for what they
produce, and to be allowed the freedom to use their own initiative. The food will then flow like water over Niagara. Communism denies both of
these requirements. It replaces incentive by coercion. Consequently, it brings less food, but more fear."
That is exactly the case. The antichrist is going to find that his socialism is not going to work any better than anyone else's. That is the picture
that we are seeing here in the black horse rider. A socialist system soon creates only scarcity and poverty. When you have a scarcity of items, you
interject inflation as well. The slaves of the communal system, in time, then become furious that the government is not able to supply the good life
they feel entitled to, and they turn to violence. A society that is functioning on violence is not a society which tends to grow food. Violence
discourages growing food because you're fighting; preserving your life; and, standing on guard over what you can, so you grow as little as you can
so that you can protect it. A socialist government has, in fact, by taxation and regulation, killed the goose of free enterprise producing the
golden eggs of prosperity. Inflation and taxation prevent a person from accumulating wealth – the wealth which is necessary to create more
productivity; to create more jobs; and, to create more prosperity.
Aren't you embarrassed as you listen to presidential candidates who don't know these simple biblical facts – these simple facts of life? I no
longer pity them. I'm embarrassed for them as I listen to them – the inanity of grown men who are asking to become the leader of God's client
nation. What a travesty.
Dr. John E. Danish, 1982
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