A Terrorist by Any Name

A Terrorist by Any Name by Bill Wilson

Missiles are flying in the air across the Gaza border toward an Israeli kindergarten and rioters are trying to violate Israel's border ostensibly in response to the US recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital. In reality, US News and World Report reported the attacks had been planned since March, the Jerusalem recognition only inflamed them. In July 2014, some 300-plus missiles were raining down on Tel Aviv. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed at the time to "intensify even further our attacks on Hamas and other terrorist organizations in Gaza." Today, Netanyahu is faced with the largest barrage of attacks since then and it's coming from the same people-Hamas and Iranian sponsored terrorists.

 

In 2005, Netanyahu, plead with Israeli leadership to end the disengagement plan of evicting Jews from Gaza.  Netanyahu believed giving up land without concessions is a demonstration that terrorism pays and that Israel's national security will be forever threatened. He warned that Gaza would become a terrorist base of operations and that Israel's defense and security may be undermined by disengagement.  He said, "I am calling on all those who grasp the danger: Gather strength and do the right thing. I don't know if the entire move can be stopped, but it still might be stopped in its initial stages." And he warned, "The government is advancing in total blindness. They have eyes but don't see. They have ears but don't hear."

 

If ever the so-called "Palestinian People" had an opportunity to demonstrate to the world that it could have a nation living side by side in peace with Israel, it was in Gaza. Instead, they embraced their roots of terrorism, elected the terrorist Hamas to govern, and have been agents of violence ever since. Netanyahu's Biblical reference applied not only to Israel, but also the United States, which pressured Israel to give up Gaza for "peace." In Ezekiel 12:2, the Lord says, "Son of man, you dwell in the midst of a rebellious house, which have eyes to see, and see not; they have ears to hear, and hear not: for they are a rebellious house." Those of that rebellious house are the reason there is a terrorist state living next to Israel.

 

The US now is trying to reverse the foreign policy of past presidents toward Israel. Instead of being told to stand down, as the past two presidents demanded of Israel when terrorists threatened its borders, the current US Administration is restating that Israel has the right to protect its borders. The Jerusalem Post quoted an unnamed US National Security Council official saying, "We call on those launching the attacks to cease this destructive violence...we fully support Israel's right to self-defense." Netanyahu is experiencing the consequences of those who refuse to recognize that terrorists don't want peace, they want total annihilation of the Jews. After more than 20 years, American leadership also is "seeing" that a terrorist by any other name is still a terrorist. 

Wisdom of Wigglesworth

Wisdom of Wigglesworth
"You must deny yourself to make progress with God." Smith Wigglesworth

The Cost of Broken Covenants

The Cost of Broken Covenants
From: Today God Is First by Os Hillman
May 31, 2018

"During the reign of David, there was a famine for three successive years; so David sought the face of the Lord..." II Samuel 21:1

There was a famine in the land, and David equated that famine to the blessing or lack of blessing from God. He sought God to know why there was a famine. The Lord did not take long to answer: "...It is on account of Saul and his blood-stained house; it is because he put the Gibeonites to death" (2 Sam. 21:1).

Many years earlier, when Joshua entered the Promised Land, the Israelites were tricked by the Gibeonites into believing they were travelers when they were actually enemies of Israel. The Gibeonites tricked Israel into making a peace treaty with them. It was one of the first major mistakes Israel made after entering the Promised Land. As a result of the peace treaty, the Gibeonites were kept as slaves to Israel. This was never God's intention for Israel. He had wanted Israel to destroy all their enemies, but they made an error in judgment that required that they honor a covenant with the Gibeonites.

Saul made a decision to disregard this covenant with the Gibeonites and sought to annihilate them. David sensed there was something preventing God's blessing on Israel. As a nation they had violated a covenant made before God. Now they were reaping the consequences.

There are two things we can learn from this story. First, when we make a covenant, God expects us to fulfill it. God is a covenant maker. He made one with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He made one with each of us through Jesus Christ. The Scriptures are numerous regarding the importance of honoring our commitments.

Second, God is a very longsuffering God. He gave Israel many years of grace before He exercised judgment for their sin. However, there always comes a day when God must uphold His standard of righteousness.

Are you failing to walk in God's blessing due to some failed commitment? Calamities can befall us for many reasons; sin can be one of them. In the case of Israel, David had to make things right with the Gibeonites. When he did this, God removed the famine, and Israel again was prosperous. When you feel you lack God's blessing on your life, ask the Lord if there are any past - generation sins that you may need to repent of. He may be waiting on us before He can release His blessing on our lives.

Words to Ponder

Words to Ponder 

The BIBLE

“Everything your hand finds to do, do it as unto the Lord.”  Ephesians 6:7

Quotes of Presidents    

“Effort and courage are not enough without purpose and direction.”  John F. Kennedy

Wise Words                                                                               “The WW II generation sacrificed their lives for something they believed was bigger than themselves. They knew the value of family; the power of God; and that life and liberty are foundational to being an American.” Bill Wilson

Today in History

Today in History

1859

Big Ben Went into Operation in London

The famous tower clock known as Big Ben, located at the top of the 320-foot-high St. Stephen’s Tower, rang out over the  Houses of Parliament in Westminster, London, for the first time on this day in 1859.

After a fire destroyed much of the Palace of Westminster–the headquarters of the British Parliament–in October 1834, a standout feature of the design for the new palace was a large clock atop a tower. The royal astronomer, Sir George Airy, wanted the clock to have pinpoint accuracy, including twice-a-day checks with the Royal Greenwich Observatory. While many clockmakers dismissed this goal as impossible, Airy counted on the help of Edmund Beckett Denison, a formidable barrister known for his expertise in horology, or the science of measuring time.

The name “Big Ben” originally just applied to the bell but later came to refer to the clock itself. Two main stories exist about how Big Ben got its name. Many claim it was named after the famously long-winded Sir Benjamin Hall, the London commissioner of works at the time it was built.

Another famous story argues that the bell was named for the popular heavyweight boxer Benjamin Caunt, because it was the largest of its kind.

Even after an incendiary bomb destroyed the chamber of the House of Commons during the Second World War, St. Stephen’s Tower survived, and Big Ben continued to function.

Its famously accurate timekeeping is regulated by a stack of coins placed on the clock’s huge pendulum, ensuring a steady movement of the clock hands at all times. At night, all four of the clock’s faces, each one 23 feet across, are illuminated. A light above Big Ben is also lit to let the public know when Parliament is in session.

State Department Unveils Plan

State Dept. Unveils Plan to Wipe Out Religious Persecution Around the World - CBN News

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is taking a major role in the push for worldwide religious freedom - one that will include a summit this summer bringing together US allies and countries seen as major offenders in hopes of advancing the cause. "It will not just be a discussion group. It will be about action," Pompeo said Tuesday as he unveiled the State Department's annual report on global religious freedom. The report highlights problems in countries like Russia, Iran, Afghanistan and North Korea.

US Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback is helping to push through a law that he created when he served as a US Kansas senator. He released his annual "name-and-shame" report on Tuesday. "We must move religious freedom forward," Brownback urged. "We must defend it from every corner of the globe. That's why the secretary is hosting the first ever ministerial on advancing religious freedom."

Earlier, in an exclusive interview with CBN News, Brownback said he also wants to convince global policymakers that promoting religious freedom can reduce terrorism and boost the economy.

"There is a direct correlation," he said, noting that a key goal for the summit, slated to take place July 25-26, will be to show how countries hurt themselves by not allowing people to freely worship. "You have less terrorism if a country is religiously free because people then can express their faith, instead of fighting you. This is in now all the economic and scientific data," Brownback explained.

Meanwhile, Brownback told CBN News the US is doing all it can to bring American pastor Andrew Brunson home. Brownback is urging Turkey to clear and release Brunson, who has lived in the Muslim-majority country for more than 20 years.

The Name Above Every Name

The Name Above Every Name by Dr. D. James Kennedy

‘And she will bring forth a Son, and you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins.’ Matthew 1:21

Many people are given exalted names but never live up to them. Charles Spurgeon tells about wandering in a cemetery and seeing a headstone inscribed with these words: “Sacred to the memory of Methuselah Coney. Age, six months.” (Recall that the biblical Methuselah lived more than nine hundred years!)

The most important name the world has ever heard is the name of Jesus, and Jesus lived up to everything that name foretold. To make sure Mary and Joseph named Jesus properly, God sent angelic messengers to proclaim what His name should be and why. “Jesus” means “Jehovah saves,” and Jesus saved all of us from sin. The Bible has many other names for Jesus, but “Jesus” was His personal name, the name we call Him as our friend, the name that celebrates Him as our Savior.

Of course, we’ve Anglicized Jesus’ name. In His Hebrew home, people would have called Jesus “Joshua.” That name, common in that time and in ours, celebrates the memory of Joshua, one of the great heroes of Israel. Joshua led God’s people into the Promised Land of Canaan and fought to drive out all the Israelites’ enemies. During his lifetime, Joshua kept God’s people in line so that they walked with the Lord.

Joshua lived up to his name. He saved God’s people from earthly enemies and led them to the Promised Land. Jesus lived up to His name by doing something even greater—saving His people from eternal foes and delivering them into an eternal promised land.

As you go about your business today, honor the name of Jesus. Each time His name comes to mind, dwell on the fact that He has lived up to the promise of His name by saving you from sin and death for eternity.

Jesus Christ is the condescension of divinity and the exaltation of humanity.  PHILLIPS BROOKS

Religious Freedom Review

State Department Reviews Religious Freedom around the World

The State Department's 2017 International Religious Freedom Report was released today. Issued under the direction of Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback, with guidance from other senior officials in the State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL), the report serves as a guide to the work yet to be done on this issue in many places around the world. 

The places which one might expect to be covered in detail (North Korea, Iran, Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, etc.) featured discussions of the major persecution taking place within their borders. Yet countries less well-known as religious persecution hot spots were featured too. For example, the report notes that in Burkina Faso, several individuals were killed and others threatened "if they did not start teaching the Quran in schools instead of the regular curricula," and the discussion of the Comoros observes the strict enforcement and preference for Sunni Islam in law. 

Muslim/Christian interreligious conflict continues to simmer at a lower level in a number of sub-Saharan countries, in some worse than others. Discomfort and conflict persists within these communities when one is seen as having the upper hand in government or society. While the concerns in these countries are often relatively less serious, it is important to address them before they flare up into larger, more destabilizing situations. And regardless, all religious freedom violations, however small, deserve to be addressed as a matter of principle. 

Human rights and humanitarian concerns drive much of the State Department's reporting on international religious freedom which we see reflected in the 2017 report. Very often, in each country's section of the report, there is a note stating that the U.S. embassy or its officials in that country hosted meetings or met with religious or government leaders to raise religious freedom concerns. While this attention is good and helpful, there is much more to the story of religious freedom. Not least in this story is the emerging proof of religious freedom's benefit to security and economic prosperity -- proof which is not being raised by our diplomats and foreign policy professionals, whether in Foggy Bottom or around the world. 

As long as religious freedom is seen merely as a humanitarian issue, governments and leaders who see nothing in it for themselves will be reluctant to address it, and we will be resigned to continue the worldwide backsliding on religious freedom that has occurred in recent years. But when the United States seriously and systematically begins to show others around the world that religious freedom is in their interest -- their security and economic interests -- we can begin to make headway.

Raising religious freedom as a human right is the right thing to do. But we have only achieved so much with this approach. If we increasingly explain the many benefits of religious freedom to those who otherwise wouldn't care about it, they may begin to see a real shift towards protecting it. Whatever else, doing what we can to protect religious freedom for the maximum number of people around the world is always the right thing to do.

-- Tony Perkins, President, Family Research Council

Wisdom of Wigglesworth

Wisdom of Wigglesworth

"There is a fruit of the Spirit that must accompany the gift of healing and that is longsuffering." by  Smith Wigglesworth

Words to Ponder

Words to Ponder 

The BIBLE

“From everlasting to everlasting the Lord's love is with those who fear Him, and His righteousness with their children’s children — with those who keep His covenant and remember to obey His precepts.”  Psalm 103:17-18

Quotes of Presidents     

“We’ve staked the future of all our political institutions upon our capacity…to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God." James Madison                                                                                                                                                                                        

Wise Words 

 “You can't stand in honor of your country and those who give you the freedoms you enjoy? There are planes leaving every day.”  Dennis Taylor

Amazing Voyage of Discovery

NASA Scientist Working on Solar Probe Mission Describes "Amazing Voyage of Discovery"

Erik Rosales (May 29, 2018)

"It's a spacecraft loaded with technological breakthroughs that will solve many of the largest mysteries about our star, including finding out why the sun's corona is so much hotter than its surface." -Nicola Fox

(Greenbelt, MD)—[CBN News] For more than a decade, NASA scientist Adam Szabo has been working on the $1.6-billion Parker Solar Probe mission. (Screengrab via CBN News)

Szabo told CBN News, "I see God's hand in the wonders of space and even our existence here on earth couldn't happen without a divine Creator."

The mission will send a probe about the size of a compact automobile into space.

It will make 24 orbits around the sun.

God's Handiwork on Display in Space

At its closest approach, the Parker Solar probe will fly within 3.7 million miles of the sun's surface, more than eight times closer than any other spacecraft and more than eight times closer than Mercury.

Szabo says he sees God's hand in the wonders of space every day. "When I look at how much energy there is in the sun and all that energy coming towards us, yet that energy is extremely dangerous if we were just exposed to it. Look at this spacecraft. Just to fly by there [the sun] we had to take extreme protective measures just for robotic stuff to survive never mind human beings," Szabo said.

The Parker Space Probe Mission

Set to launch on July 31, 2018, from Cape Canaveral, Florida, the Parker Solar Probe will study how heat and energy move through the sun's atmosphere, known as the corona, which is hotter than the sun's surface.

It will send data back to Earth, where NASA scientists will explore what accelerates the solar winds that affect Earth and other planets.

The probe is named after Eugene Parker, who first hypothesized that high-speed matter and magnetism constantly escaped the sun and that it affected the planets and space throughout our solar system. (Screengrab via CBN News)

This phenomenon is now known as the solar wind.

Solar Probe to Answer Many Questions

"Parker Solar Probe is going to answer questions about solar physics that we've puzzled over for more than six decades," Parker Solar Probe Project scientist Nicola Fox of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, said in a statement.

"It's a spacecraft loaded with technological breakthroughs that will solve many of the largest mysteries about our star, including finding out why the sun's corona is so much hotter than its surface. And we're very proud to be able to carry Gene's name with us on this amazing voyage of discovery," she added.

Six onboard instruments will also measure the sun's electric and magnetic fields, as well as its solar winds and other phenomena.

Space weather may not sound like something that concerns us here on Earth, but scientists estimate solar events that happen without warning could cause trillions of dollars in damage in the US and a serious coronal mass ejection, or CME, could leave parts of the country without power for a year or more.

The probe will blast off inside a Delta IV rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Scientists say the hardest thing will be to say goodbye to it forever.

Probe Carries 1.1 Million Names

The probe will carry over 1.1 million people's names to the sun this July, the US space agency said.

In March 2017, the public was invited to send their names to the sun aboard humanity's first mission to 'touch' a star.

A total of 1,137,202 names were submitted, and a memory card with the names was installed on the spacecraft on May 18—three months before the scheduled launch on July 31.

The card was mounted on a plaque bearing a dedication to and a quote from the mission's namesake Eugene Parker.