The Calm Before The Storm

                Prophecy teacher Joel Rosenberg made the statement concerning the death of Hal Lindsey....and CBN picked up on it to headline an article. That statement was....The End Of An Era.
                Hal Lindsey's 1970 book....The Late Great Planet Earth....was indeed in many ways the beginning of an era. That book was the biggest selling non-fiction book of the entire decade of the 1970s. Whether or not this story is true I don't know but it has often been reported that The Late Great Planet Earth was found on the bed table of David Ben-Gurion on the death of Israel's first Prime Minister.
                Orson Welles narrated the film version of the book in 1978. You would probably be hard-pressed to find any Christian of that era who did not at least read the book....or knew of the premise. The prophecy movement came side by side with the whole born again movement....and both came alongside the emphasis in may quarters of evangelicalism....primarily thanks to R. C. Sproul...on the holiness of God! All three of those eras have ended. We are not interested in the Second Coming....unless it is the second coming of Trump....no one has to be born again anymore to be a Christian....only a church going conservative....and prima facie evidence that we have no idea the holiness of God is in our unconditional support of a man like Donald Trump. 
                We are into a new era in the church today....the make America great again movement! The whole country it seems has fallen into disrepute and disrepair....sports....governemt....entertainment....everything! This is what a country looks like when God leaves it to its own devices. Ichabod! The glory has departed. Ethics are gone....winning is all that counts. Compassion is gone....revenge is in.
                Idolatry is literally everywhere! I don't know the exact multiplication factor but I know this....the same country that Billy Graham warned of judgment with all of his might....is multiple times worse in every way than it was during that....era....when we knew that judgement was coming....and when we knew that one had to be born again to be saved....and we knew we could not even stand upright in the presence of a holy God!
                It seems to me that we are in the calm before the storm....as when the angels held back the winds from the four corners of the earth....and as when there was silence in heaven for the space of a half hour. By 'calm' I mean that we are not worried about God's judgment at all....or personal judgment.