David Reagan - A Nation Begging for Destruction, Part 1
The America of today is radically different from the nation I grew up in, and the changes have taken place with startling rapidity. Incredibly, in just over 50 years since the decade of the 1960s, we have become a nation in full-blown, open rebellion against God. I would, in fact, argue that we are now a nation that is literally begging for the judgment of God. For the reasons I believe that, stay tuned.
David Reagan: Greetings in the name of Jesus, our Blessed Hope, and welcome to Christ in Prophecy. The theme of our 2015 annual Bible conference was “Messages for a Rebellious Nation.” We had five speakers at the conference, in addition to myself. My specific topic was “A Nation Begging for Destruction,” and I would like to get right into it. Here now is a portion of that presentation.
David Reagan: The America I grew up with is gone. It is dead. And in my opinion there is absolutely no hope whatsoever for any resurrection. I was born in 1938, and on July the 29th that will make me 77 years old. And when I was growing up in the 1940’s and the 1950’s we went to church three times a week; we went every Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday evening, we had four week-long Bible Gospel meetings a year, one every quarter. All but the most essential businesses like hospitals, pharmacies and gasoline stations were closed on Sundays. There were no secular events, on Sunday or on Wednesday none whatsoever not even sporting events. We had daily prayers and Bible reading in school. We celebrated Easter and Christmas with special plays and musicals. We used readers in our English classes that consisted of Bible stories. And at graduation time, we always had a special service called a baccalaureate services where a minister would come and deliver a sermon to the graduating class.
Every public event from court proceedings to city council meetings to PTA meetings, to sporting events were all opened with prayer. Movies and television programs were strictly regulated by strong moral codes. Our local, state and national leaders talked openly about God and their Christian faith. And they often led prayers, as Franklin Roosevelt did on D-Day in 1944 when we invaded the European mainland. I could go on and on, but I think you get the picture. America was not a perfect nation when I was growing up. Racism was still rampant. Materialism was gaining momentum, but we were still a nation that honored and recognized the Christian principles of our forefathers and the founders of our nation. And we were still very aware of the fact that our blessings came from God.
The America of today is radically different, and the changes have taken place with startling rapidity. Incredibly, in just over 50 years since the decade of the 60’s, we have become a nation in full-blown, all out, open rebellion against God. We worship the almighty dollar. Greed has become our national motivator. Sex is our obsession. Gambling is our national past time. We are the world’s greatest user of illicit drugs. We have banned God from our schools. We have declared God off limits in the public arena. We are teaching our children the fantasy of evolution. We are slaughtering babies in the name of freedom of choice for women. We have glamorized homosexuality. We have legalized same-sex marriage. We are in the process of legalizing marijuana. And we have become the moral polluter of planet earth with our violent, immoral and blasphemous television programs and movies. We are a rebellious nation. In summary, we are a nation that has rejected our Christian heritage and we have replaced that precious heritage with a crude and paganized culture. We are a rebellious nation that is thumbing its nose at our Creator God who showered us with unparalleled blessings for over 300 years.
Here’s how I summarized it in the new 2nd edition of my book, Living for Christ in the End Times subtitled, Coping with Anarchy and Apostasy. I wrote, “We have expelled God from our society, and the result is an avalanche of wanton violence and immorality. We have lost our moral compass, and we are raising a generation of moral pygmies. The same is true of the raging apostasy within the Church. The term, Evangelical, has lost its meaning, as some who claim to be Evangelicals are proclaiming that there are many roads to Heaven and there is no Hell. A second reformation is going on in the Church today, but unlike the first, which was based on a call to return to the Bible, this new reformation is calling people to jettison the Bible in behalf of their own feelings and their own beliefs. As the Church grows increasingly weak from its internal rot, society continues to plunge into darkness. I would therefore assert that we are a nation begging for destruction.” I say that because the Bible clearly reveals that God has a definite way of dealing with rebellious nations. First, He calls them to repentance through prophetic voices. Then if they refuse to repent, He sends remedial judgments. And if the rebellion persists, there comes a point of no return when God will deliver the nation from judgment to destruction.
Let’s take a look at God’s prophetic warnings to our nation. He is so good. He is so patient. He is so long suffering and He has been warning us for a long time. The first person I would cite is this man, Peter Marshall a great Scottish-American preacher. He came to this country in 1927 when he was 25 years old. He died in 1949 when he was only 47 years old. During his 22 years in this country, he went to seminary in Georgia and distinguished himself immediately as an amazing, eloquent preacher. He quickly became the pastor of the prestigious New York Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C. in 1937, the church that was then known as the Church of the Presidents. In 1947 he became the Chaplain of the United States Senate. At that time, our nation was literally on top of the world. We had won World War II; we had emerged from the war as the world’s most powerful nation. Our economy had been revived and was generating unprecedented wealth. Our potential for the future seemed unlimited, but Peter Marshall was spiritually unsettled.
Even before the war ended in 1945 he sensed in his soul that America was heading in the wrong direction toward a secular, pagan society. He unleashed his pent-up concerns in a sermon delivered in 1944 in New Orleans. The sermon was entitled “Trial by Fire,” and it focused on the spiritual battle portrayed in the Bible between Elijah and the prophets of Baal. He began the sermon by quoting William Penn, the Quaker founder of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania who said, “Men must be governed by God or they will be ruled by tyrants.” Marshall then proceeded to express his concern that our nation was getting caught up in the moral drift and confusion that characterized the ancient Israel of the prophet Elijah when that nation became captivated by idolatry and turned its heart away from God. Over and over and over in the sermon, he declared the time had come in America for us to take sides to decide whether we were a nation that was going to follow Yahweh or Baal. Each time, he put the challenge in the words of Elijah, “If Yahweh is God follow Him; if Baal, follow him.”
In the middle of the sermon, Marshall called for prophetic voices: “I suggest to you that America needs prophets today who will set before the nation the essential choices.” He then proceeded to speak prophetically, he said, “Love of power and authority has enslaved the hearts of many Americans. The seeds of racial hate and intolerance have been sown. And we will reap a bitter harvest. Our moral standards have been lowered. And no nation makes progress in a downward direction.” This is 1944 in the midst of World War II. He developed his point further by saying, “We must decide and decide quickly who is chief, whom we will serve. Millions of people in America today live in a moral fog. Modified immorality on the basis of cleverness guides millions of people. Modified dishonesty within the letter of the law is the practice of millions more. Surely the time has come,” he said, “because the hour is late, when we must decide. And the choice before us is plain; Yahweh or Baal. Christ or chaos. Conviction or compromise. Discipline or disintegration.” Marshall then concluded his sermon with an absolutely startling proclamation. First time I ever hear this sermon which is recorded I was driving down a highway. And when we got to the end of this sermon and he made this proclamation I nearly drove off the road I was so startled. Here’s what he said, “We need a prophet who will have the ear of America and say to her now, ‘How long will you halt and stand between two opinions? If Yahweh is God, follow Him, but if Baal be God, follow him, and go to Hell!'”
That was 1944, and just as Peter Marshall feared, we as a nation became captivated by materialism in the Post War Years. This obsession, in turn, fueled a spirit of rebellion against God and His Word. For many years we had been overwhelmed by the great suffering of the Great Depression, and living through that time, we had felt a great dependency on God. But now, we were able to stand on our own, and God and His Word receded into the background. This led to the morally disastrous decade of the 1960’s and the Sexual Revolution it produced. And that, in turn, resulted in God sending us the prophetic voice that Peter Marshall had yearned for.
Part 2
David Reagan: Let me ask you a question. Do you have any idea who the person was who suddenly appeared on the scene in response to Peter Marshall’s hope that God would send a prophetic voice? In a moment, when we return to my presentation, you will find out, and you may be surprised at who it was.
But first, let me explain something about the supernatural gift of prophecy. There are several aspects to it. They include: the ability to understand prophecy, the ability to teach prophecy, and the ability to preach prophetically. Now, regarding the latter, any preacher who is gifted in applying the Word of God to contemporary social and moral issues like homosexuality or abortion is considered to be a prophetic preacher.
Another aspect of the gift of prophecy, and one that we seldom experience today, is supernatural knowledge of the future. Now there are some who believe that this aspect of the gift of prophecy ended in the First Century, but folks, that is not true. First Corinthians 1:7 says that all the gifts of the Spirit will continue until the return of Jesus.
Now, I have been proclaiming for years that America is in rebellion against God. And I have warned repeatedly that if we do not repent, God will destroy our nation. Folks, that warning is not based on any supernatural knowledge of the future. Rather, it is based on knowledge of God’s Word and what it reveals about how God deals with rebellious nations.
So, although I have not been given any supernatural knowledge about the future, I believe God can give such knowledge to persons, and I believe he has done so, and I believe His Word promises that He will do so in the end times. I say that because Joel chapter 2 says that in the end times God will pour out His Spirit and one of the manifestations will be dreams and visions that will be given to male and female and to young and old.
Let’s return now to my presentation concerning the revelation of the prophetic voice that God raised up in the 1970’s in response to Peter Marshall’s hope.
David Reagan: That voice arrived on the scene in America in 1974; exactly 30 years after Marshall had called for it. The voice was that of a remarkable man by the name of David Wilkerson. Wilkerson started out as a Pentecostal preacher in rural Pennsylvania. In 1958, at the age of 27, he felt the Lord’s calling to pull up stakes and move to New York City to minister to its violent street gangs. Through many trials and many tears, he succeeded in establishing a great ministry to the gangs of New York. And in 1962 he wrote a best-selling book that told about his experiences. That book was called, The Cross and the Switchblade. It made him nationally famous, and even more so when it was converted into a movie in 1970.
As a result of the book and the movie, Wilkerson became the darling of the Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements until he published another book in 1974 called, The Vision. It was advertised by the publisher as quote, “A terrifying prophecy of doomsday that is starting to happen now.” The book presented a very negative prophecy about the future of our nation, warning that because of our rebellion against God, we were headed toward major judgments and ultimate destruction. The world, as we would expect, wrote the book off as totally insane. But what proved tragic is that the Church also dismissed the book as that of a raving radical. The Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements responded with strong condemnation of the book. They were full of pillow prophets at that time who were prophesying a great end time revival that would renew and refresh America as a Christian nation. They did not want to hear a negative message from anyone, especially from their best known spokesman. Overnight Wilkerson became a pariah. His books were removed from the Charismatic and Pentecostal church bookstores, and he was personally condemned as a fear-monger.
In like manner, mainline churches both Evangelical and non-Evangelical also denounced the book, they argued that Wilkerson must be a false prophet because quote, “God no longer gives visions.” Wilkerson had anticipated that response because he addressed it at the very beginning of the book by pointing out that the Scriptures say that in the end times, God will give his servants visions and dreams. He pointed to Joel 2, “It will come about after this that I will pour out My Spirit on all mankind; and your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions. Even on the male and female servants I will pour out My Spirit in those days.” What days? Notice verse 28, “It will come about after this.” After what? If you read the verses before you will find out, after the re-establishment of the nation of Israel; in the end times, that is what this is talking about. In accordance with this passage, Wilkerson revealed that his prophecy for America had come through a vision that was given to him in April of 1973, and for that reason, he called the book, The Vision. Wilkerson also pointed out at the beginning of his book that he did not believe that most of the prophecies in the book would be fulfilled in his lifetime. And that proved to be true when he was tragically killed in an automobile accident in East Texas in 2011.
However, many of the prophecies contained in his vision have been fulfilled since 1974. Let me give you an overview of them. His first category was “Worldwide Economic Confusion.” Look at what he wrote in 1974, “It is not really a depression I see coming but a recession of such magnitude that it will affect the lifestyle of nearly every wage earner in America and around the world.” That of course was fulfilled in the Great Recession that began in 2008.
He further asserted, “Some of the nation’s major corporations will declare bankruptcy.” This began in 2001 with Enron, PG&E, California’s largest utility company. Ten more huge corporations collapsed during the Great Recession, including such giants as Lehman Brothers, General Motors and America Airlines. Wilkerson predicted that, “Fear generated by the economy will lead to a revolution at the polls.” And that is exactly what happened in 2008 when the Great Stock Market Crash occurred, a few months later, just two months later we had Obama elected. He said this concerning the auto industry, “That it’s going to be hurt very badly during this great recession.” And that is exactly what happened as General Motors and Chrysler were both taken over by the U.S. Government.
He had this to say about gold, “The price of gold is going to rise astronomically but will not be sustained over a long period of time.” In 1974 when he wrote that the price of gold was $183 an ounce. At the end of 2014 it was $1200 an ounce. Wilkerson’s last prophecy related to the economy was this one, “A revived Roman Empire will eventually become the power base for a super world leader who will arise to restore economic order.” This has been partially fulfilled in the formation of the European Union which became a super-national political organization in 1992 with the signing of the Treaty of Maastricht.
Wilkerson’s second category of predictions related to what he called “Drastic Weather Changes and Earthquakes.” He summed it up with this, “The world had best prepare for weather changes that cannot be explained by any other word but ‘supernatural.’ The world is about to witness the beginnings of great sorrows brought about by history’s most drastic weather changes, earthquakes, floods and terrible calamities.” As you can see from this chart worldwide weather-related disasters have increased from an average of 300 per year in the 1980s to almost 1,000 a year as of 2010.
The third category of Wilkerson’s predictions was called “A Flood of Filth.” Again, keep in mind he’s was writing in 1974. He said “We are facing a moral landslide. Satan is going to open the floodgates of Hell and seek to baptize the world in erotic filth, smut and sensuality.” And the evidence of this is all around us today and in our homes thru the invasion of television filth. He wrote, “Movies and TV programs will feature the exploitation of every sex theme, with an emphasis on blood, violence and occult practices.” Well movies like Pulp Fiction and television programs like Criminal Minds and Jersey Shore are doing this today.
He wrote, “There will glamorizing of rape.” And we just saw this in the recent movie, 50 Shades of Grey.
He wrote, “Thousands of newsstands across the nation will soon be selling explicit sex magazines that will make Playboy seem almost puritanical.” Needless to say that has happened. All I can show you from the covers of these books were simply the headline at the top because the covers were so horrible.
He then wrote, “Students will be told that homosexual love is normal.” And that is in the curriculum of many states today. It is demonstrated on the front of this Archie comic book aimed at kids celebrating a same-sex marriage. He wrote, “The homosexual community will become so militant and so brazen that they will flaunt their sin on network talk shows.” And that’s exactly what’s happened as you know if you tune into any of the late night shows or if you tune into Ellen DeGeneres. Then he said, “Homosexuals and lesbians will be ordained and given places of authority.” This is 1974 he is writing this. The very first one came in 2003 when the Episcopal Church ordained this man who abandoned his wife, abandoned his family, shacked up with a homosexual lover and the Episcopal Church made him a Bishop, unbelievable.
He also wrote, “Divorce and immorality will become more and more commonplace among ministers.” And that problem was featured on the cover of Time Magazine in April of 1987.
Wilkerson’s fourth category was “Problems with Youth.” And since this had always been the focus of his ministry, he had more predictions in this category than others. Let me just summarize them, “He said he saw youth hating their parents, rebelling against their parents, even to the point of betraying their parents.” He said that, “He saw them enslaved to alcohol and drugs and he predicted the legalization of marijuana. All of which would be magnified by a growing astronomical divorce rate.”
Wilkerson’s fifth and last category he called “Persecution Madness.” He said, “I see an hour of persecution coming such as mankind has never before witnessed. This will be a persecution of true Jesus believers that will soon arise like a many-headed monster out of the sea.” And we can see that antichrist spirit operating in government today. He wrote, “An antichrist spirit will enter the hearts of certain men in high places in government, in the judicial system, causing these officials to engage in legal maneuvers designed to harass independent churches, missionaries and ministers.” He said, “TV comedy shows will become bolder and bolder in poking fun at Christ and true Christians. Television programming will become absolutely blasphemous.” I don’t even have to say anything about the fulfillment of that.
And yet, despite the fulfillment of these very specific prophecies and many others Wilkerson’s vision, continued to be attacked, he was claimed to be a false prophet because some of his predictions have not yet been fulfilled. Well let me tell you something folks, if that is going to be your measure of a prophet then you could say that Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel were all false prophets because they made prophecies 2,500 years ago that have not yet been fulfilled. How do we know they are true prophets? Because they made prophecies in their day and time that was fulfilled because they made prophecies about the First Coming of the Jesus that were fulfilled. And because of that we know the prophecies they made about the Second Coming will be fulfilled.
The Bible says the test of a prophet is when the word of the prophet comes to pass the prophet will be known as one whom the Lord has truly sent. Whether or not what he says comes to pass. And thus, if I were to prophesy to you that America is going to be destroyed by a nuclear explosion, the only way you could test whether or not I was a true prophet is have to wait until America is destroyed and see whether or not it was destroyed by a nuclear explosion. And you might have to wait 50 years or 100 years. But if I were to say to you America is going to be destroyed by a nuclear explosion on January 1, 2016, and that comes and passes and it doesn’t happen you know I am a false prophet. But Dave Wilkerson did not give any dates for his prophecies, except to say that he believed that all of his predictions would not be fulfilled in his lifetime.
Some of the unfulfilled prophecies are very ominous. They include: The U.S. will experience the worst earthquake in its history in a place least expected. The taxation of churches, ministries and Christian schools will be instituted. TV will feature nudity and X-rated porno movies.
But for me, the most ominous statement in the entire book is this next one where he wrote, “I believe we have passed the point of no return.” 1974. I underlined that in the book in red and put a question mark after it because I was not willing to say that in 1974 when he said it. But I am willing to say it now. The Bible clearly teaches there is a point of no return when a nation is in rebellion against God there is a point of no return. It is the tipping point where God decides to deliver the nation from remedial judgments to destruction. In the Bible it is referred to as “when the wound becomes incurable.”
Closing
David Reagan: Well folks, that’s our program for this week. I hope it’s been a blessing to you, and I hope you will be back with us next week, the Lord willing, when we will present the second half of my presentation. In just a moment the announcer will tell you how you can get a full copy of my sermon, together with the other five presentations that were made at our annual conference.
Until next week, this is Dave Reagan speaking for Lamb & Lion Ministries, saying, “Look up, be watchful, for our Redemption is drawing near!”