Easy Chair Series

Satanic Cults; Bible and Child Abuse; Melanesians; Obedience and Coercion; Death Education; Conflict of Early Church; Christian Work from Early Church until Middle Ages; St. John Chrysostom; Name Calling and Fighting between Protestants and Catholics; Multiple Murders; Praying for Persecuted Christians

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 15-91

Genre:

Track:

Dictation Name: EC156

Year: 1986

This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 156, October 20, 1987.

On the last Easy Chair I discussed a number of things and I made reference to a book and said I would deal with it on another occasion. That book is Maury Terry, The Ultimate Evil: An Investigation into America’s Most Dangerous Satanic Cult, published in 1987 by Doubleday and Company.

This book describes the work of an investigative reporter. What he found was that in the famous trial of Berkowitz, the man who some years ago was arrested for murders and advertised as a result of something he had written as Son of Sam. In investigating this case he had reason to believe that Sam was arrested and was being tried to put a stop to all the agitation over the cases. He believed that Sam Berkowitz was, indeed, guilty of... or David Berkowitz was guilty of one or two of the crime, a series of cultic murders, brutal murders, all of innocent young women.

One of the police detectives agreed with him. When they began the investigation they ran into all kinds of roadblocks. The detective was demoted. Subsequently, when he retired an attempt was made to prevent him from drawing his pension.

In the course of his investigation what he did demonstrate was that, indeed, there was a cult, a church, a satanic church, Church of the Process, one of many such satanic churches which was behind these things, which believed in ritual murder and sacrifice and drinking the blood of victims and of police dogs because German shepherds represent a hated group, the police.

As he proceeded with his investigation, which included the religious satanic background of Manson, of the Stanford Chapel murder, of a Bismarck, North Dakota murder and much more, whenever he was close to somebody who was involved that person was killed. This even reached up into the very high levels, multi millionaires so that by way of conclusion he says that he has demonstrated that this group exists, that they do operate an elite hit squad for various satanic groups involved in drugs and pornography, that the Church of the Process came here from England. And he says there is no insulating middle America. The power of this movement is beginning to affect the whole country. He says that these people are interested in drugs for their own parties and to make money. He believes that some of the people at the very top, powers that prevented any real investigation may not believe in all the mythology of Satan which the cult propagates, but what they do believe is that people can be led and used and used in a very effective way. The group involves drugs, pornography. It involves child prostitution and child pornography and also call girl circles. It is very powerful.

Moreover, the ideology of these groups is apparent in heavy metal music and a great many of the rock band music. For example, here are two things coming from The Summit Journal which are parts of rock band music.

The first, “Sacrifice, oh so nice. Sacrifice to Lucifer, my master. Bring the chalice. Raise the knife. Welcome to my sacrifice. Plunge the dagger in her breast. I insist. S A C R I F I C E, demons rejoice. Sacrifice, sacrifice. Name your price.”

And another. “We are possessed by all that is evil. The death of you, God, we demand. We spit at the virgin you worship and sit at Lord Satan’s left hand.”

Now this is the kind of music that teenagers are listening to and are making multi, multi millionaires out of the people who promote this kind of thing. We are in a crisis. And in that crisis the Church is doing little and is, by and large, willfully impotent.

We have groups like the scientist Edmund Leach who said, “There can,” I quote, “There can be no source for moral judgments except the scientist himself. In traditional religion morality was held to derive from God, but God was only credited with the authority to establish and enforce moral rules because he was also credited with supernatural powers of creation and destruction. Those powers have now been usurped by man and he must take on the moral responsibility that goes with them,” unquote.

This is from an article, “We Scientists have the Right to Play God.”

Moreover, as the sociologist Nesbitt has pointed out—and rightly so—that environmentalism is now a religion. We would add that it is a religion in terms of Genesis 3:5, every man being his own god and yet at the same time saying, “I am not to blame. The environment did it to me.”

We have de-Christianized our schools and they are now for the destruction of Christianity.

It is interesting that as Herbert Schlossberg and Marvin Olasky in Turning Point: A Christian Worldview Declaration, published by Crossway books this year, 1987 points out that in the public schools, and I quote, “A textbook description of the first Thanksgiving neglected to identify to whom the pilgrims were giving thanks. When one child told her mother that Thanksgiving was when the pilgrims gave thanks to the Indians, the mother called the principal and suggested that it might be educational to point out was when the pilgrims thanked God. The principal of this New York suburban school replied, ‘That is your opinion,’” unquote.

That is the kind of thing that prevails today. And what are Christians doing about it? Nothing.

Just three weeks ago today I was a witness in a trial in the south in a Bible belt state of several churches. The trial was going to last three weeks for sure. It was a trial of a number of churches because they refused to go along with a welfare department regulation that in their activities, whether daycare, Christian school or Sunday school or any youth activities, children’s activities, that there be no spanking, in fact, that there be no deprivation, no one be told to sit in a corner or to be told they don’t get their treat. These churches, because they resisted, were being accused of child abuse. No parent had filed the complaint, but that was the charge. And the state attorney in the course of cross examining me called attention to the fact that these churches were operating using a child abuse manual. The name of that child abuse manual was the holy Bible.

Now where were the Christians in that Bible belt state? They were certainly not in the courtroom. They were not protesting to the governor. They were doing nothing. Apart from the minister of the churches involved, the courtroom was empty. The Christians didn’t care enough to be there.

And as one minister told me, in that state if the devil ran for governor on the Democratic ticket, most of the church people would vote for him, which tells you what their faith is.

I received today something in the mail from a friend who is in Africa, was born there and is making a stand against the state control of the churches and of Christianity. Now I have heard church leaders speak very favorably of the prime minister and of the minister of education in that state and routinely so and I have read such statements. Why? Because both men are churchmen, but what do they believe? The minister of education has his own version of the Lord’s prayer. Let me read it.

“Our Father which art in the ghetto, degraded is your name. Thy servitude abounds, they will is mocked as pie in the sky. Teach us to demand our share of gold. Forgive us our docility as we demand our share of justice. Lead us not into complicity. Deliver us from our fears. For ours is thy sovereignty, the power and the liberation for ever and ever. Amen.”

And another poem, this same Christian in his “Prayer of Anguish,” as it is titled.

Quite a few verses, but I will just read the last eight lines. It is written in mock dialect because the man is a well educated man.

“Gonna given you, preacher, my money to help the white man run my life. Gonna learn about Malcolm, Africa, Max and make it back on the path with my wife. Gonna sell my Bible and buy me a gun. Then I’ll get my freedom this very day. I will shoot white honkies, black house niggers and your behind, too, God, if you get in my way.”

Now that is the church. That is the church. And it is doing nothing to deal with the issues at hand. This is not the way it once was. The Church at one time did have an active role. We will come to that a little later.

But meanwhile Humanism has nothing to offer. Let me read to you the statement of an anthropologist with which he concludes his book on the Melanesian peoples. This is Philippe Diole, The Forgotten People of the Pacific, published by Barron’s in Woodbury, New York in 1976.

The Forgotten People of the Pacific, is, as I have said, about the Melanesians, people who while now they have stopped some of their practices such as cannibalism and human sacrifice, still have things such as homosexuality as a routine thing, male transvestites and the women folk regularly nurse the baby pigs at the their breasts. They put that high an evaluation on their baby pigs.

But does the author, this anthropologist or writer feel that these people should change, that they should grow, that they should develop other standards? Not at all. He says in the conclusion of his book, and I quote, “The fact is that the world cannot remain stationary, but it is wrong to force people to change. It is equally wrong to force them to remain the same so that we may preserve their originality and their innocence. Cultural immobility exists only in the imaginations of anthropologists and curators of museums. Who are we in any event to teach the way of true happiness? Surely we cannot hold ourselves up as examples. Have we been able, with all our dizzying philosophies and our glittering technologies, to evolve a way of living that conforms to our interior needs and offers us contentment? It is not possible... impossible that the forgotten peoples of the Pacific may become our teachers rather than our disciples. For the moment only for a brief moment, I fear, their homes are sanctuaries of humanity.

“What would it be like, I wonder, if in contemplating these last vestiges of the Humanism of savagery we were finally to learn the secret, the secret that we have always sought and always ignored, the secret of being at peace with ourselves and our environment,” unquote.

Now that is the great secret of Humanism and of education today. There is nothing worse than our civilization and Christianity is responsibility for it.

I had a professor tell me that. Our civilization is the most depraved thing in the world and Christianity is responsible for it, whereas the savage peoples of the world are the only decent good people. And who are we to correct them in their cannibalism?

Those are important to their way of life and their faith.

I wish some of these people would offer themselves as food for these cannibals. But this is what we have. This is the kind of approach that marks education, because if you do not have a faith in God, in Christ, you are going to look at the world and say, “Why should it be changed? What constitutes good and evil? Why is something right and something else wrong?”

For example, one of the socialists who is a very prominent writer in this country and has been prominent in several administrations in his influence, Michael Harrington, in a book I cited about a year ago, The Politics at God’s Funeral: Spiritual Crisis of Western Civilization raises a question twice in his book which he feels is the key question of our time. And I would say for him it is. I quote.

“How do we now deal with what Isaiah Berlin has called the central question of politics? The question of obedience and coercion. Why should I obey anyone else? If society no longer provides a plausible answer, because its most prominent spokesperson in this area, God, is dying, isn’t that precisely one of the factors making for the fragmentation, bewilderment and anxiety which can be observed in every western society today?” unquote.

And, again, on page 207 he raises the question.

“In a society in which the legitimacy of political power is no longer cloaked in the aura of God, why obey the law? Why die for the common good?” unquote.

Well, that is why the schools are what they are. They have no standard of good and evil. Why live or die for anything? This is why, as Sam Blumenfeld of our staff has pointed out, the schools now educate for dying. The children are taught that there is no good reason for living. In some instances they actually are taught to prepare for death, to write suicide notes. Is it any wonder that so many of them commit suicide?

Is it any wonder that we have laws, thus? Remember, almost a generation and a half, perhaps two generations ago Justice Brandeis said, and I quote, “If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law, it invites every man to become a law unto himself. It invites anarchy,” unquote.

How much more so when the civil government attacks the foundation of law, God; attacks the foundation of morality, God; when it teaches systematically immorality in the schools; when it promotes abortion and homosexuality; when it funds groups that promote such things? What you have to say is that we are seeing organized evil and that the state has become not the defender of the good as Paul says it must be in Romans 13, but a terror to the good. Isn't that what it is in this southern state where the Bible is being called a child abuse manual?

And nobody will get excited about it there or anywhere else. We are facing judgment because we deserve it. We deserve obliteration at the hand of God. It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed as Jeremiah said, because we deserve to be wiped out.

This is the direction our world is taking. And people will not wake up.

And, by the way, waking up means putting your money where your mouth is. One of the things—let me speak here personally—that turns my stomach every time I travel—and I do all the time. And I have spoken on the past month to hundreds and even thousands of people. And what do I get?

“Oh, Mr. Rushdoony, I can’t wait of the Chalcedon Report to come. It is the best thing I have ever read.”

And I ask them, “And what was your name?”

And they tell me and then I know immediately they have never sent in a penny. And do you think God is going to bless them for that? And do you think God is going to bless the people who go to church and tell the minister what a marvelous sermon it is and contribute nothing or next to nothing? We face the judgment of God and people have earned that judgment. They worked for it and then they are going cry and whine. Why did this happen to me? Why did I lose my job? Why are we facing this and that fearful evil at the hands of foreign powers?

Well, it is because that is what they have earned. That is what we as a people have earned. And we are going to reap God’s judgment. We have seen the evil growing. And we do next to nothing about it. And people who are in the front lines and are fighting get only criticism by and large.

Otto has talked very often, when he comes back from his trips—and he is away on one now—on how many people come up to him, thousands, who speak with delight of the materials. If half of those ever contributed, we would be able to do more.

By the way, Otto Scott this past week spoke at a conference in Southern California. The other two speakers were Vice President Bush and Governor Deukmejian of California. And all who were there and all the reports indicated that it was Otto Scott who carried the day, who alone faced up to the issues and confronted them with what is happening and the only solution.

Well, people like to hear that. But all they are content with doing is hearing as though hearing were enough. What are they doing? What are you doing? Our world, our country is on the brink of disaster.

Well, we may go into slavery on the short term. On the long term we are going to have a greater freedom and a greater triumph of Christianity than any of us can begin to imagine. But like the people who were led to the boundaries of the Promised Land and sentenced to die in the wilderness because they had been faithless to their God they had served them with their lips, but not with their heart, mind and being. So they died in the wilderness. So, too, unless this generation changes, it may die in the wilderness, in a wilderness of chaos, of economic disaster, of international disaster, every kind of disaster.

I am wary of people telling me that they belong to such and such a church and saying, “Of course, we know it is not what it should be, but it is the church my folks and my grandparents and my great grandparents were a member of and we are going to try to recapture it.”

Well, what are you doing to recapture it? Nothing. Very little or nothing. Why not go out and help create a godly church, a godly society? Why stay with a building that is an empty hulk, empty of God, empty of Christ and is under his judgment? Do you stay on a sinking ship because that is the one your parents and your grandparents and great grandparents sailed on? Or do you get off the ship because it is doomed?

Well, maybe I sound too emphatic to suit some. But I see so much indifference everywhere I go. I know the Lord is going to take care of me, but what is he going to do to all these people who have nothing but pious gush to give to me and to Otto and to everybody else who think God is going to be grateful because they said something nice to us? And they said that they liked us.

We don’t want to be liked and we don't want to be hated. We want to stimulate people to action for Jesus Christ, for his kingdom.

They don’t seem to be worried about their children and grandchildren. But it is time to be worried.

I am going to turn now to a very different kind of book. This book is over 100 years old. It was 1879 when it was translated into English from the third German edition. So the first German edition preceded it by some years. This book is Gerhardt Ulhorn, U L H O R N, The Conflict of Christianity with Heathenism. You might find copies of this, rather battered copies, no doubt, in some of the used book stores. My copy goes back to the 30s when I first read it. And I reread it just this last month.

The thing that is interesting about this book is that it tells us, of course, of the conflict of Rome and the early church. The Roman state was like the modern world, degenerate.

As Seneca said, “The aim of philosophy is to despise life.”

The meaning of life was gone. No one felt that there was much to live for.

Recently the film director John Huston died. And in an interview given not long before his death he made this statement. “We are all losers.” This was his article of faith. And going back to one of his earliest films starring his father, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, you see his perspective on life. We are all losers.

This is a logical faith of the fallen man, for the unbeliever. The antithesis of that is a biblical faith which says, “In Christ we are all winners. We are more than conquerors.” But Christians don’t live in terms of that. They seem to believe with John Huston that we are all losers.

Well, the interesting thing about this book is that it gives us a grim picture of the hostility of Rome to the Church, the propaganda against the Church.

The early Christians were accused of cannibalism and the propaganda was that the communion service was a cannibalistic feast. They were accused of practicing incest and much, much more.

And being a Christian had its price then. You did not get away with a slap on the wrist. Let me quote.

“Christian virgins, it is verily devilish, were condemned to be taken to the public brothels to be abandoned there to the most horrible abuse. The heathen knew how highly the Christians esteemed chastity and that to them its loss was worse than death. And yet when the Christian virgins Sabina of Smyrna was apprised of this sentence she replied, ‘Whatever God wills.’

“That was the heroism of martyrdom. That was to conquer all through Christ. A faith which so loved and suffered was invincible. Its victory was sure. And of it could the apostles say even before the conflict had begun, ‘Our faith is the victory which hath overcome the world,’” unquote.

Now that was the world we as Christians lived in in the early church. And yet before they even owned a building they were doing some remarkable things. For example, at the Lord’s supper they brought gifts chiefly natural products. And from this they took what was necessary for the bread and wine of communion and the rest when to the clergy and the poor. Very early they started a number of institutions, first, in terms of 1 Corinthians six, courts to deal with justice so they would not have to go to the Roman courts. They started houses to house orphans and to educate them. They also started old folks homes. Furthermore, they established hospitals. Moreover, since in those says hotels were also houses of prostitution and a girl came with the room and if you kicked the girl out they would send a boy, they started houses to entertain Christian guests to provide housing for them when they were traveling. This is the kind of thing the early church did. This is why they conquered. They created a godly government and even as the Roman government was collapsing because all around it evil was prevailing and it was a part of that evil increasingly that Christians provided government.

There is an interesting book written by a Jewish Michele Riquet, R I Q U E T, Christian Charity in Action, which describes what was done in those centuries and well into the Middle Ages. It was published some years ago, so it is now out of print, in 1961. But in it he has a great deal on the kind of thing that was done.

Another aspect of their charity was ransoming prisoners, captives, anything and everything they could do to minister to human need. They did this because they felt that God required it of them.

Moreover, in Constantinople St. John Chrysostom with 100,000 members under his diocese, under his bishopric was supporting 50,000 widows, orphans, needy people, elderly people and yet he would preach with intensity, “If you feel that what we are doing though the various ministries of the Church absolves you of responsibility personally to take care of need where you see it and to bring needy people into your home, then God will judge you, because we are all called to represent Christ.”

Well, we have forgotten that aspect of the ministry. In fact, we have suppressed it. What happened was that the poor tithe which was once a part of law throughout the world, throughout Christendom, that is, and a part of the English speaking world and carried over to the colonies, began to wane. The Reformation in the area of theology and ecclesiology did much good. But it also did much damage because the tithe together with the property of the monasteries were transferred to the king and the king began to control the Church tithe and the poor tithe.

And, as a result, a problem of poverty and welfare began to develop. And that problem is with us still. And only Christians have the answer. They must restore their responsibility in Christ.

One of the problems with the ancient Greeks was that they did nothing to minister to human need, by and large, because they believed progress was automatic, that things would take care of themselves. Insofar as they believed in a kind of progress because they tended to cyclical ideas. However, as Robert Nesbitt, the sociologist has pointed out in his History of the Idea of Progress, “The Greeks contributed the seminal conception of the natural growth in time of knowledge and, accordingly, the natural advance of the human condition,” unquote.

In other words, everything was going to get better with time. And so no need to worry about problems. Time would take care of them. And we still quote proverbs that reflect the Greek point of view. Time heals all wounds and time cares for all problems and so on and on.

And, as a result, we have neglected our duty. In fact, Catholics and Protestants have become better at hating each other than doing the will of the Lord.

One of the things that is fearful is to go back and to read some of the literature, to see the names they called each other. Now, granted, there were real issues in the Reformation and the Reformation was a necessity for both Protestantism and Catholicism. It did good. But in the process, much hatred developed.

For example, according to Richard S. Dunn in The Age of Religious Wars, 1559-1689 we read, and I quote, “Parisians continued to believe their lead priests who taught that a good Catholic would eat his own children rather than submit to a heretic,” unquote, meaning a Protestant as a pope. That is why Henry IV had to adjure Protestantism to become King of France.

Was that unusual, that kind of thinking? No. The Protestants were reciprocating in kind and the result was Humanism triumphed as against both Protestantism and Catholicism. Both had become more concerned in fighting each other than in fighting for the faith.

This, by the way, was true of the Jews at the time of our Lord. At the time of Christ being Jewish, being a believer had different meanings for different persons. For some it was faithfulness to the temple ritual. For others it meant freedom for Judea as a political organism and so on and on. Every group had their own definition of what constituted Judaism and a good Jew. And, as a result, the country forgot God. They warred against one another and they neglected the prophet of whom Moses spoke, Jesus Christ.

And we are doing the same today. The Old Testament and the New have a common ethical framework. They require us to serve the Lord our God with all our heart, mind and being and our neighbors as ourselves. This is the meaning of being God’s people, of being the redeemed of God.

Moreover, in both the Old and the New Testament there is a statement made about poverty. In Deuteronomy 15:4 we read that if the people are faithful to God’s every Word, and I quote, “There will be poor among you.” And in the New Testament we read that when they were faithful and loved one another, and I quote from Acts 4:34, “There were no needy persons among them,” unquote.

What have we done? We have reduced Christianity to a false concept of salvation. I won’t go into an experience I had just within the past month on a flight. In fact, it may be an account of it in the Chalcedon Report before too long. However, in the course of the conversation with this particular person, she was trying to tell me that a lot of the converts of is particular group were marvelous Christians even though they were still on drugs, even though they were still involved a number of things. She didn’t say so, but some of them were stilling living out of wedlock with their live in boyfriend or girlfriend and so on and on. She insisted they were saved, marvelously saved.

And I said I would be inclined to question their salvation. There are no fruits in their lives.

Oh, yes. They were fearful of hell and they came to Jesus and they know that he saved them from hell.

And I told her with no small intensity. Jesus Christ does not save us from hell. He is our Savior from sin. Hell is only the consequence of our sin. And he didn’t come to save us from hell for heaven, as she insisted. He came to save us from sin and to make us his people, the people of righteousness, the people of justice.

We have been saved, Paul tells us, that the righteousness of God might be fulfilled, put into force through us.

If you feel you have been saved from hell and that is what your salvation is about, you are all wrong and you are still in sin, because Jesus Christ has saved ... is the Savior from sin and our sin is our attempt to be as God, to determine good and evil for ourselves, to see ourselves as our own law, to want to have our own way of life and have Jesus Christ as fire and life insurance agent. Support us in our life. It is no wonder that the converts of this group which pulls in 100 million dollars a year are on drugs after 13 years. And why not? They are not saved from sin. the group doesn't try to save them from sin. It just says, “Jesus Christ is your Savior.”

Oh, by the way, she also said she was against lordship and dominion preaching and teaching.

Well, I think I have said enough on that subject. Let me go on to something else. But it is related.

John Lofton gave me a copy of a book. The author is Eliot Leyton, L E Y T O N, Compulsive Killers: The Story of Modern Multiple Murder. It was published by the New York University Press in 1986. It is a story of all the various multiple murder murderers. It is ugly reading, vicious, incredibly vicious people. But the thing that comes through is that these criminals were thoroughly modern people. They knew their psychiatry and they knew why they were doing what they did, or thought they knew. It was society who was to blame or their parents who were to blame.

One of the worst killers had studied psychology and so he knew all the jargon, but all of them were conversant even as I have found children of seven and eight have picked up the language. And they know that they can blame parents and others. In fact, as far back as the 50s this one child who was willfully disobedient and flagrantly so, so outraged the teacher once at the vacation Bible school that the teacher went after him with blood in her eye and he cringed and said, “Don’t you hit me. Don’t you hit me. What I need is tender loving care, love and affection, that sort of thing.”

Well, one of these multiple murderers said, “Why was the world against me?”

Another found meaning through destruction. Only by killing could he find meaning.

One of the worst killers was a psychology graduate and his interpretation of guilt was thoroughly in terms of it. And even after having confessed much, he said, “I don’t feel guilty for anything. I feel sorry for people who feel guilt. More than ever I am convinced of my own innocence.”

Here is a man who murdered 20, 30 girls. Why does he feel innocent? Because society did certain things to him and therefore society is guilty.

Another said, and I quote, “The people I murdered had murdered me,” unquote. It wasn’t that he had ever met those people, but they had things he didn’t have and therefore they were murdering him.

They all had these common traits blaming one another.

Of course, the author doesn’t see those common traits and looks elsewhere for them. Some of the mass murderers that are listed are Bundy, Kemper, deSalvo, Speck, Parrons, Starkweather and others. Many of these were interviewed and the account, as I say, is a thoroughly horrifying one.

But the conclusion that we must come to is that original sin is exemplified by these people.

The author is right when he says that these killers are not alien creatures with a deranged mind, but then wrong when he says alienated men with a disinterest in continuing the dull lives in which they feel entrapped. Rather what we have to say is they are sinners and they are sinners who are trying to justify themselves through their sin.

One of them said, “Being a professionally perfect person, I hate the establishment.”

A professionally perfect person.

Some of them hated those who are superior to them. Anyone better than they was somehow evil and had gained their position by evil and therefore had to be killed. So to excel was a sin in their eyes.

The author, in fact, goes so far as to say, and I quote, “Yet what they are all orchestrating is a kind of social leveling in which they rewrite the universe to incorporate themselves. No one expressed this more clearly than Starkweather when he said that dead people are all on the same level,” unquote.

In other words, these mass murderers are doing the same thing as the Socialists and the Marxists and a lot of people in other parties, the Republican and Democrat. They are going to level everybody. They insist it is wrong to excel and therefore those who excel must be leveled.

And so we have a world in which a leveling is underway through politics and through murder. How are we going to change it? No way apart from Jesus Christ. No way. We are ready to do anything except support the work of Reconstruction, further the work of Reconstruction, take upon ourselves the task, where we are, of being a force for Christ.

It is not the duty of just Chalcedon, but of every believer and there is no future for us as a people unless we all see our responsibilities under God. When we do that, then the world will begin to change.

What happened to the early church? The men who were martyred lined up, beheaded one after another so that they had to have shifts of executioners there were so many lined up to be killed, virgins sent to houses of prostitution. It was a bitter and a difficult battle. But they fought it. That is how we got our freedom. If we don’t work for our freedom we will see our children’s children reduced to the same level in order to fight their way back to freedom.

The choice is yours. What are you going to do about it? What are we going to do about it?

“As for me and my house, we shall serve the Lord,” must be the statement of all of us.

God bless you as you make that effort. Pray for those who are under persecution in the United States and the Soviet Union and the world over. Begin by remembering them every day in your prayer and God bless you as you serve him.

Good night and thank you for listening.