The twentieth century witnessed the greatest transition in human history toward man’s desire for a new world order. No other century had faced a world war, let alone two world wars. Because of limited transportation means, earlier wars occurred in local, restricted geographies. Because of limited weapon systems, mass destruction was never known on the scale as witnessed by the atomic bomb in the twentieth century. World War I brought new concepts to warfare; World War II brought humanity to a whole new level of thinking in regard to conquest. We witnessed faster means of transportation on the ground and in the air. Man’s concept of conquering and controlling humanity continued to increase in the earth. The twentieth century witnessed the face of the world and its governments globally change with increasing speed.
A New World Order
One important global event occurred on June 12, 1987, a day set aside to mark the 750th anniversary of the city of Berlin. While speaking at the Brandenburg Gate near the Berlin Wall, President Ronald Reagan gave his famous cry: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” As pressure grew from both Rome and global governments, Russian resistance collapsed. Finally on November 9, 1989, after years of strict communist control, East Germans were allowed to cross over into West Germany. By June of 1990 the wall was officially dismantled, marking an epic moment of the twentieth century.
Two months later, on August 2, 1990, the world quickly learned of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. On February 24, 1991, a lightning fast, one-hundred-hour ground war was fought by a world order army of thirty-eight nations brought together by the United Nations. With cameras carried into battle by embedded media, the events were seen by satellite around the world.
On September 11, 1990, during the buildup to the Persian Gulf War, President George H. W. Bush addressed Congress with a speech entitled “Toward a New World Order.” Then by 1992 the European Community (formerly the European Economic Community, ECC) was rising in power, emerging as a possible forerunner to a hypothetical United States of Europe, U.S.E. As the twentieth century drew to a close, a greater world consciousness was rising among its leaders.
President Bush’s announcement of a “new world order” was not the beginning of this concept. Woodrow Wilson used the term during the development of the League of Nations following World War I. The term was used loosely during development of the United Nations following World War II. The concept finally filtered down into pop culture with John Lennon’s satanic prophecy “Imagine.” In this simple ballad, he prophetically cried for this new world. Its message imagined a day when there would be no countries existing, no religion, no heaven, no hell, no personal possessions, and everyone living for today. Then and only then, he believed, would the world become as one. Lennon’s dream was a world of hedonism without religious faith, without national pride or sovereignty; it was a one-world government overseeing communal property. Without any personal possessions to fight for, he then reasoned there is no need for war. Amidst his philosophical global idealism, it is interesting to note that he died with an estimated $250 million for his mistress and his son to inherit.
Powerful voices continue to rise in the earth pressing the world toward a communal life enjoyed through “taxing of the rich”; ironically, these voices will never allow themselves and their possessions to be affected by such measures. Though Acts 4:34–37 speaks of the early Christians’ selling what they had and giving the money to the Apostles to be distributed for the needs of the Christians, we must never forget they did this voluntarily as the Lord led them. This sharing was not forced upon them; only a portion of Christians were led of God to do this. This passage of Scripture does not promote communism, Marxism, or socialism. This giving was done as the Lord impressed hearts to give. In these early days of Christianity, many were coming into this new faith at Jerusalem; many decided to stay in Jerusalem because of their hope of hearing more of this gospel message of Jesus Christ. These new converts needed daily provisions. There is no indication in the Book of Acts that this “need” would continue throughout the coming years. What we are hearing from the American President and from all of the political leaders going back even to the early part of the twentieth century is a completely different concept. They seek ultimately a Marxist, communist government dictatorially controlling every aspect of humanity; a government that leads to the oppression of its people.
A New Kosmos
A crucial word presented in the New Testament is kosmos, a Greek word simply translated as “world.” The word could mean “the world of mankind” or “a world system controlled by man, alienated from God.” Its context dictates its interpretation.
Between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2, something happened to God’s created world when chaos and darkness appeared on the earth. We believe at this time a portion of the angels fell under the powerful influence of Lucifer, who then became Satan. Genesis 1:3 commences the six days of creation; the earth once in chaos now becomes the earth in kosmos or “adornment” (the literal meaning of this Greek word). God’s creation brought kosmos or an adornment of law, order, design, perfection, and beauty.
However, since the fall of Adam, man has been creating his own “world order.” Psalm 2 sets forth man’s desire to build his own world without the acknowledgment of God: man’s world versus God’s world or man’s world view of order versus God’s world view of order. Man today believes that without God he can order his world through science and technology; he believes he can bring about universal peace, universal prosperity, and universal religion without God. He envisions a world system or order without the need of God or the principles of His Word. This late in history he believes mankind has arrived at a golden age ready to birth that utopia for which man has long searched by himself. World rulers are now speaking more openly of a world order to come; it is one that has never been known before, transcending cultures, borders, languages, ethnicities, political ideologies, and especially religions. They eagerly await the emergence of a “new world order.”
History and Its Call for a New World Order
The call for a new world order goes back to the building of Babel in Genesis 11. This early civilization at Babel sought a single controlling government mixed with a unifying religion symbolized in a great tower. Ever since the Tower of Babel men have written about their own hope for a similar utopia. The word utopia suggests an imaginary ideal community or society. Appropriately, the term utopia (coined by Sir Thomas More in 1516 for an imaginary island in the Atlantic) is a Greek-based word meaning “no place.”
Perhaps the first recorded utopian proposal is Plato’s Republic written almost four hundred years before Christ. He called for a small number of individuals chosen to be trained to become society’s “philosopher-kings.” These brilliant leaders would eliminate poverty and deprivation throughout the inhabited world by justly distributing all of the collected resources. Eventually all individuals opposing their plan would be weeded out, leaving only a peaceful society given over to pacifism—the ideal society for Plato. Amid these ripe conditions, the philosopher-kings would be able to implement their plan for a perfect world.
Aristotle responded to Plato’s Republic by declaring that society would never permit such oppression unless they either were forced or deceived into such a takeover. Both force and deception have been used by leaders throughout history to bring about their personal concept of a utopia. When Thomas More wrote his Utopia, he presented it as the blueprint for a working nation. Interestingly, since the sixteenth century, debate has continued concerning whether the prefix to More’s Utopia was actually a pun on eu-topia or “good place” along with the meaning of u-topia, “no place.”
As Christians we must realize that man will never be able to bring about a “good” place; man is born in sin and shapened in iniquity. Man will try to beat his swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks (Isa. 2:4), but only the coming of Christ back to the earth will usher in His millennial kingdom. Man’s world order will always fail. The twentieth century has proved this through attempts by Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Hussein, and the constant failure of Marxism and the various breeds of communism. Nothing perfect will ever come about through man. Although God gave the scepter to a “golden” king of Babylon, the “times of the Gentiles” will end in a world empire of iron mixed with clay.
The End Time will witness the worst example of world rulership. Even now we are witnessing a global oppression of humanity through the world governments; if God did not intervene, mankind would eventually destroy itself. The Bible predicts that Christ will come and take the kingdoms of this world and produce His own; this will be the saving of humanity. His peace will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.
In spite of the constant failures of man and his governmental attempts, he continues to vigorously press for a new world order for humanity. Walter Mills in Road to War, America from 1914 to 1917, made the following observation about Col. Edward Mandell House, an aid to Woodrow Wilson:
The Colonel’s sole justification for preparing for such a bath of blood for his countrymen was his hope to establish a new world order of peace and security as a result.
On July 26, 1968, the New York Times in an address to the International Platform Association, quoted then New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller as he called for “the creation of a New World Order.” In the book The Occult in the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler is cited as saying “National socialism will use its own revolution for the establishing of a new world order.” In 1974, Richard Garner (former deputy assistant to the Secretary of State under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson) in his work Foreign Affairs stated the following:
In short, the house of world order will have to be built from the bottom rather than from the top down, and end-run around national sovereignty eroding it piece by piece will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned assault.
In 1976, President Jimmy Carter stated, “We must replace balance-of-power politics with world-order politics.” The Illuminati, who have been working for centuries to bring about such a world order, in their writings taken from the 1780s, also declared, “It is necessary to establish a universal regime and empire over the whole world.” The Human Manifesto II of 1973 was signed by an elite group from various segments of society; in this work they affirm the following:
We deplore the division of humankind on nationalistic grounds. We have reached a turning point in human history where the best option is to transcend the limits of national sovereignty and move toward the building of a world community, a system of world law and world order based upon a trans-national federal government.
On April 25, 1983, Benjamin Creme, a guru of the New Age movement, noted in a prestigious lecture: “What is the plan? It includes the installation of a new world government and a new world religion under Maitreia.”
Concerning this push toward a new world order, it does not matter who is in the White House or who leads the State Department. There has been a single thread of purpose connecting the White House, the State Department, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and even secret societies and extreme New Agers: they all believe there must be a new world order. This new order requires the elimination of national sovereignty and its replacement with world government, world police force, world courts, world banking and currency, all controlled by an elite class of new visionaries. This belief has been behind all the Presidents of this past century and certainly that of the present. Although some Presidents portrayed themselves as “Christian” or “conservative,” rhetorically implying they were against globalism, yet behind the scenes they were promoting it. Rising with our present administration in Washington, there is the extreme pressure toward a complete redistribution of wealth. In this global fever there must be the eventual elimination of biblical Christianity. Many, including our President, believe that for such a new world order to succeed there must be a decreasing of the world’s population to enhance tighter control over humanity.
In an article on the new world order in the SCP Journal, Tal Brooke, quotes Brock Chilsom, director of the United Nations World Health Organization:
To achieve world government it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, their loyalty to family, to family traditions, to national patriotism, and the religious dogmas of history. (Summer 1991).
The core premise of a new world order is aptly summarized in the Rothschild publication The Economist, in its cover story of June 28, 1991, entitled “The World Order Changeth”:
There should, however, be no illusion that a global police force run by a global democracy is feasible. Those who have carried the winning ideas to the top of the mountain and now wish to spread them will not allow this process to be vetoed by a semi-converted or by plain, tough means. If that sounds painless, it is not. The mountaintop is thick with those who would rather not see trade that is liberal, aid that is too principled, or arms control that is too self-denying. America needs to remember that a willingness to involve others is not enough to make a collective world order work. There must also be readiness to submit to it. If America really wants an order, a new world order, it will have to be ready to take all of its complaints to the GATT [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade], finance the multilateral aid agencies, submit itself to the International Court, bow to some system to monitor arms exports, and make a habit of consulting the U. N. (Emphasis added).
Are Americans willing to be bound by the actions of the United Nations to condemn a nation such as Israel that is following the dictates of the New World Order? For that matter, would Americans be willing to be drafted into an army by the United Nations mandate to fight a war of its choosing rather than America’s choosing? This is what our administration is pressing hard to bring us to. Though the last presidential decision of President Bush before he left office was to plunge us into deeper debt, we have not gotten over the shock of what the past four years have brought upon our country. Even within the hours after the most recent election, laws passed without the voice of Congress are leading us into a future that is without any horizontal hope. Will the new world order usher in a glorious era of peace? Or is it the beginning of a dictatorial world nightmare?
Why the New World Order?
Why has the concept of a new world order, along with its overtones from secret societies and the occult, progressed consistently over an extended period of time? Wealth does not explain it, for the people behind the concept have gained wealth beyond their dreams. Political power does not explain it, for all these players have enjoyed their moments of pinnacle power. Capitalism does not explain it, because powerful men have made their billions through capitalistic enterprises. There is something more. There must be another power at work which has succeeded in molding and shaping the United States’ public policy toward one clear goal, the goal of world government. Many books have been written on the subject. Some point to the influence of the eighteenth century elite group, the Illuminati; others point to the demonic “ascended masters” of the New Age religion; and still others have pointed to the world designs of a well-known but secret fraternal order manipulating the international banks and multinational corporations.
However, we must realize as believers in Scripture that while God has a plan for this world, the Devil also has his plan for the world. Ever since God’s intervention at Babel, the Devil has been pressing to bring mankind together under one world government and one world religion controlled by his man, the Antichrist. It is God Who has prophesied that this would happen; He is in control of it all; it is part of His plan to allow a foolish shepherd to be the consummating product of man.
America will not return to its former days of glory. It is weighed in the balance, as Babylon was, and is found wanting. The writing on the historical wall of our country has sealed our fate. We must either be overthrown as a nation, assimilated by other nations, or broken into pieces.
America was the last deterrent toward the vision of an Antichrist world order to come. Basically, all other countries are further down the road to the new world order than we are. However, more than ever we are escalating toward the destruction of our national sovereignty in order to more aggressively embrace this New World Order.
Conclusion
In our next issue of Straightway, we want to present what we believe is ahead in the next four years to conform us as a nation toward the coming of Antichrist. We do not believe that our nation’s President is the Antichrist; nevertheless, he truly is a forerunner, one who is making ready a people prepared for Antichrist. Only God knows what He will permit to take place before the Rapture and what will come with aggressive force after the Rapture. We simply must be ready to face whatever will come by God’s divine permission.
We are Pre-tribulation Rapture believers. I know there are those in Fundamentalism who believe the Rapture takes place in the middle of Daniel’s Last Week, and still others believe it will take place at the end of the Tribulation Period. We certainly do believe that antichrist systems have been in the past and are in existence in the earth today. The Antichrist could be alive on the planet today and rising in the political world. Yet we believe that before he comes to complete power as an international leader, the saints will be raptured. We must be ever “watching and waiting” for that Blessed Hope to take us away before the great and terrible day of the Lord. The Lord said, “Behold, I come quickly.” And may the cry of John be our daily prayer, “Even so, come, Lord Jesus.”