“The powers that be are ordained of God.” Thus are the words of the apostle Paul in Romans 13:1. The apostle wrote his epistle to the Romans around ad 58, ten years before his execution under the hand of the Emperor Nero (reign, ad 54–68). Within this epistle Paul unfolds principles concerning Christians living under world governments on earth. In chapter 13 he designated government as a “higher power.” He also declared the divine appointment of governments to bring law and order to people and nations.

In November 2024 the United States of America became one of sixty nations during this year to hold elections for their top national leadership. The election in the United States resulted in a vote for a new administration that gained both the electoral and popular votes in an unprecedented manner. The nation truly voted for a philosophical mandate of government to do away with the ongoing powers promoting the literal dismantling of America, both politically and economically. A new leadership now is called upon by the majority of Americans to return to principles and values that had placed our country in the forefront of independence, rather than the ongoing pursuance of becoming a third-world country escalating into the dark powers of socialism and communism.

When the Bible speaks of the nations, it takes the reader back to Genesis 10 and 11. It was the city and the tower of Babel begun and led by Cush and his son Nimrod that brought the judgment of God. God forced a scattering of the people by diversifying their speech and vocabulary in many languages. However, we should note the perspective provided in Deuteronomy 32:8, “When the most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of the people according to the number of the children of Israel.” Acts 17:24–31 reveals that God made all mankind, and He is the God of every nation, of every ethnic group. There is only one God for all the human race.

When God made man, He first made his body and the nature of that body from the ground, the earth. This specific ground that God used was called adamah, meaning a “moist, red ground” or a rich, cultivated ground. It is a ground ideal for a potter to use in the making of clay vessels.

History is one of the greatest voices against the contemporary powers of our time. History teaches us from where we have come, revealing either digression toward failure or progression toward success. It is imperative that we know “from whence cometh man?” Such a question must also include from “whence cometh the earth and the universe?” Maybe more importantly, we should ask, “from whence cometh the evil of man, his wickedness, and his proclivity to destroy the good and promote the bad?” This inquiry leads invariably to other questions: “Was man ever good? If he was, what brought about his innate desires and obsessiveness to evil?” “Has man devolved?” “Is man’s progression to evil to be called evolution?” “Is man’s innate pull to evil a part of an animalistic nature that still controls his evolution?”

Throughout all of God’s creation, from the vastness of the universe and the angelic hosts to the earth and all that is found upon it, there is no creature declared to be made in the image and likeness of God except man. To some extent this truth declared in Genesis 1:26 (“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness”) has been an enigma throughout the history of theological study. To what extent is this image and likeness? Truly God made man with holiness and righteousness, with an absence of sin, and with an eternality of soul. God chose to make man with a full personality of intellect, emotions, a will, a self, a heart, all found in a spirit-soul breathed into man. We may go so far as to believe that man’s bodily image was fashioned after the image in which the second personality of the Trinity, the Son, later came to earth.

One of the great biblical enigmas, as well as a source for continual debates throughout Church history, has been the subject of Satan. Who and what was this creature? Why did God create this powerful angel, knowing the outcome of this created being and the mysterious, overwhelming wickedness he would birth both in heaven and throughout the history of the earth? Yes, why did God create Satan? To approach this question from a biblical perspective, we must carefully view the few scriptures given concerning his beginning.

This article concerns a very important and critical truth of discernment for this hour in which Christians live. Sad to say, most Christians will fail to come to a clear consciousness of the flesh’s power and its profound influence in their living.

The critical key in the fall of Adam and Eve was their choice for the flesh life of self rather than the spiritual life with God. Thus, mankind has continually been drawn to the sin principle inherited from Adam; the New Testament calls this principle the flesh. Every child, with the exception of Jesus Christ, has been born with the sin nature or the nature of the flesh.

Cultural revolutions have been great and accelerating influences upon humanity especially in the last one hundred years. What is a cultural revolution? How does it sweep over a society, nationally and internationally? Unfolding the breadth of this term will help to understand its far-reaching magnitude upon global societies. A cultural revolution often embodies the desires and ambitions of what a man or group of men see for the future of humanity.

In God’s providence, the Protestant Reformation was the movement that brought the public message of the church back to the soundness and absoluteness of the Scriptures. This important belief reestablished that the fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith are based upon supremacy of the Word of God alone. Through the centuries leading up to the Reformation, Roman Catholicism’s apostasy had destroyed the Scriptures’ public effectualness.

Coming to the end of the nineteenth century, mankind began to anticipate that the twentieth century would be the century of hope for which man for thousands of years had been looking. In fact, the 1800s eagerly predicted that the twentieth century was almost guaranteed to be the century to usher in peace; it was prophetically called the “Christian Century.” This optimism was soon shattered by the ominous tensions that led to World War I. This bloodbath event brought a rude awakening to the continued reality of the true sinful nature of humanity.

Having entered into the twenty-fourth year of this new millennium, we never expected that the rapture for God’s saints would be delayed this long. We have experienced the powers of providence pressing us onward in our walk with God while the powers of darkness have taken us increasingly into the vestibule of the coming of Antichrist. These present articles of Straightway will introduce six areas of present history that consider “how should we then live?” in the light of the present distress rapidly enveloping the world. This first article sets forth the question in the light of “the days of the demise of public Christianity.”

One of the crucial keys in the unfolding of this burden is that the world has come to a different mindset than that which existed in previous centuries. For nearly two thousand years, the global thinking (at least in Western civilization) has been the logic of reason, particularly linear logic that is based on absolutes of the thesis and antithesis. Linear logic was grandly explored by the metaphysical Greek philosophers. This logic was built upon the premise of law, order, design, purpose, and beauty, as well as the reality of right and wrong, truth and error, and both the distinction and the separation of a thesis and antithesis. It was also based on absolutes and the fact that opposites in logic cannot be blended together.

There are several approaches that could be taken concerning the demise of morality, but we want to carefully and honorably approach this burden from the standpoint of its effect on manhood. America has been tampering with the biblical governing ethics of morality for such a long time that we have descended into an estate filled with debauchery and “strange flesh.” America’s moral legacy is bankrupt. The moral chart and compass has been destroyed, and we are found drifting from one fleshly novelty to another, taking us deeper and deeper into a cesspool of filth and stench.

The Lord called through His prophet, yea, His watchman Jeremiah, to stand by the roads and “ask for the old paths.” The strong Hebrew word ask means “to demand, to require, to interrogate.” Jeremiah calls for them to ask in order to find the old paths and walk in them. Regretfully, the people’s emphatic response was “we will not walk therein.” To compound the sad reality of stubbornness and rebellion, they no longer desired a watchman to sound the trumpet from his tower on the wall. Although the prophet warned them, they would not hearken to him.

Over the years of my earthly father’s ministry, a variety of observations have been made about his preaching. About thirty years ago, while preaching in a Bible Conference, he poured out his heart as he always did in preaching. After a particular service a young boy came up to him and asked, “Why do you preach so loud?” My father knelt down by him and in a gentle voice stated, “Well, young man, I am a bell, and in my preaching I am ringing out warnings to the people about this world, and sin, and the need of living for God. I preach loud and strong, for this is the purpose of a bell. Do you understand?” The young boy responded that he did. About that time his mother came up, and the boy immediately introduced my father to her by stating, “Mom, this preacher is a bell.” Of course, my father had to explain the situation to the mother. The young boy throughout the rest of the Bible Conference continued to address my father by saying, “Hello, Preacher Bell.”

Among the twenty-seven precious books that comprise the eternal canon of the New Testament, there stands the epistle Jude next to the end. Although brief, its approximately six hundred words are of profound importance for the days in which we live. Of the New Testament’s four short epistles (Philemon, II and III John, Jude), Jude is the fullest in burden. Its providential placement in the biblical canon honorably makes it a “preface to the book of Revelation.” Appropriately, the message of this little book concerns the falling away of the institutional church on earth before the Second Coming of the Lord. It is the epistle that contrasts the Beloved of God and the Behated of God in history.

The previous article noted the Holy Spirit’s providential appointment of the epistle of Jude as a preface to the book of Revelation. Jude is the crucial book prophetically dealing with the falling away of the institutional church on earth throughout its history. By A.D. 45 this falling away had already commenced in the Church. Another Gospel, another Spirit, and another Jesus were being proclaimed by false Christs and false teachers already coming like wolves into the fold to spoil the flock.

Many heart-rending stories have arisen from the tragedy of the USS Indianapolis on its fatal voyage after leaving the little island of Tinian near Guam in the South Pacific. It was an overcast night, July 30, 1945, when a Japanese submarine took advantage of a momentary break in the clouds to locate and torpedo the Indianapolis. The ship was on its way to the Philippines when the fatal blow was struck. This was the last U.S. Naval vessel to be lost in World War II. Of the 1,198 crew members, including 39 marines, 317, including 9 marines, survived 5 days in shark-infested waters before finally being rescued; only 129 of the crew, as of August 1, 1995, are alive.