Egypt

MSNBC, newspapers and other news sources are headlining the Egyptian shouts of We are free! We know that the crowds in the square believe this, but how does the rest of the population feel? Many are more worried today than they have been in decades. Just how free are the people? At one moment they were fairly free from outside influences, sources that would turn them into an Islamic state and then turn their aim towards Israel. That freedom is considerably lessened. There was some freedom for other faiths to worship but that may erode quickly. They were free to struggle along with the rest of the world during this economic upheaval but they may eventually wish they could turn back the hands of the clock and their young men may wind up dying on battlefields. Freedom comes at a price and the crowds demanded freedom right then without even looking at the price tag. As for our involvement, we abandoned yet another ally and endangered a second and what did we get for it... favorable headlines, the holy grail of the political animal. The Muslim Brotherhood will play Egypt like they played our White House and are now in a better position to win, for they are patient and brutal. The Russian Revolution of February, 1917 had similarities to today's Egypt. Wages were down and food prices were rising. Mass demonstrations erupted. The Tsar, Nicholas II, abdicated in March. The provisional government was moderate in many ways but Vladimir Lenin returned to Russia in April and the minority Bolsheviks rallied. The Bolshevik Revolution would follow. The headlines of the New York Times on November 9, 1917 were Revolutionists seize Petrograd; Kerensky flees. A pledge was given by the Bolsheviks to seek an immediate democratic peace with Germany in the then current world war. The Bolsheviks were unpopular and as the New York Times reported from those fleeing Russia, they were "not 1%, of the total population in Moscow, and all Russia outside of Petrograd, would stand together (against the Bolsheviks.)" Another quote from the same paper described the fleeing provisional leader this way "the excellence of Kerensky's motives and ideals is recognized, but he is too gentle a man...it has been shown that the policy of mildness with the Bolsheviks does not pay." In my blog of March 3, 2009 I related how I happened to be in Paraguay one week after a revolution occurred there and that the following year (1989)  was one of one revolution and reform movement after another, some for good and some not. I wrote that "people's emotions spread like the wave at a sports stadium." The blog was a critique of the Obama's administration and its refusal to consider consequences or look beyond political implications. There is euphoria in our media today... and Lady Gaga showed up at the Grammy's in an egg, presumably to hatch before the show.....life is good. Biblical end-times prophesy took off like a rocket in the early 70s with Hal Lindsey's Late Great Planet Earth and continued into this century with Tim  LaHaye's Left Behind series. Events in Israel were so astounding, particularly the capture of Jerusalem in 1967, that this was bound to happen, and the church became inundated with date-setters and detailed military logistics of what was just ahead. Much of the church reacted to this by treating biblical prophesy as leprous but I suspect that today, many see what is happening around the world, in the push for a one-world government needing only a crisis for fulfillment, the proliferation of nuclear weapons to volatile states run by madmen, in the new paradigm of truths being relative and in ominous power of the Internet on the passions of man, not to mention what science reveals to us about our changing earth and of cosmic influences, and find themselves meditating deeply, more and more, upon biblical prophesy and at least wonder ...what if. Maybe this is the way that it should be. That Jesus would be at the very doorstep of His return, and believers would be oblivious to what was ahead is untenable from what the Bible says. That we would have an advance itinerary and a time frame is also untenable. An extreme soberness is what is called for today, in fact at all times, for we know not what a day will bring. Martin Luther said that he would plant a tree if he knew for certain that Jesus was returning the next day. My tree is a hope that God would commission His Holy Spirit to move across the American landscape one more time, for no ideology, no scientific evidence to refute His existence, no madman or postmodern paradigm of intellectual chaos can, should God will to constrain it, deny a people returning to Him. Last days prophesy is not leprous, in fact it is a blessing as Revelation 1:3 states "Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophesy, and blessed are those who hear and who keep what is written in it, for the time is near." but it is toxic if abused. If not abused it is a shining ray of glory into God's majesty, a source of strength, and it overflows with hope, for God truly is in control! There is not a day that passes where newspapers do not relate the pain and suffering undergone by people all over this world, and these stories pain those readers who also know that all suffering will end only after Christ returns in judgement to a violent world. His Second Coming should be our hope along with confidence that it will be, sooner or later, in His perfect timing. True freedom comes when one has been ripped, not out of the clutches of a dictator, but of Satan's, and but for the embattled Christian in Egypt who may be looking for Christ's coming more than we do, there may be more freedom as the world sees it, but far less security.