Monday Morning Music Ministry

4-6-26

But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. 2 Peter 3:8

My version of this basic truth is in a child-rearing context, that the days drag on, yet the years seem to whiz by. An anomaly. And for God, infinitely wiser and more just than any of His mortals, I wonder how He must be amused (or perplexed) that we seldom apply His perspective. He hears intense debates about whether His universe is 6000 or billions of years old; He must grieve that humankind has always speculated about life on other planets, but is so casual about killing lives on the earth He made for us.

Yet we go on our way. Have we learned bitter lessons? Have we learned from mistakes and horrible sins? Have we learned anything from the precepts of God that He has offered freely so we may be spared of consequences?

My framing of the question about condensed time is inspired by meditating on Holy Week… and from today’s headlines as well. The events – I should say the very fact – of Jesus’s earthly life is as fresh and relevant today as when the Incarnate Lord walked among mankind. And, of course, He lives today in our hearts and through the Holy Spirit. It is further the case that the truths He shared are not relics of other times and other cultures! It is, parenthetically, the reason in King James translations many of the verbs are italicized to read in the present tense: everything about the Savior is the same yesterday, today, and forever. “He changeth not.”

In a “micro” sense, to borrow from contemporary parlance, this week I am struck by the similarities between the few years encompassing the weeks of Jesus’s birth and Jesus’s death. Famously, Mary and Joseph found “no room in the inns” and Jesus was born in a humble stable – a gentle but striking representation of the Divine affinity with humanity; no respecter of persons, the Lord is accessible to all.

What are we confronting two millennia later? A raging bloodbath in the Middle East, including upon the very sand where Jesus walked. The footprints of Abraham, too, father of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Mohammad walked on those sands. And so many figures central to the world’s faiths. In the City of Peace. The region, however, has always endured anything but peace, and we know that “wars and rumors of wars” will beset us.

But these very days are very different. News reports are published and denied; press releases obscure facts; policies change when leaders are embarrassed. However the thrust of the horrifying news this week is literally unprecedented. I am a voracious consumer of news from various sources around the world – one has to be in the era of biased media – and the situation seems to be clear that a genocidal Israeli government, openly declaring a crusade for a “Greater Zion” that would stretch from the Mediterranean to eastern Persia (Iran) and from the Nile to Turkey, has attacked, and dragooned its client the US to join, in deadly attacks on neighbors near and far. Collaterally, it has just annexed southern Lebanon, a country with, by the way, a Christian president. (Many American Christians, who blindly support Israel’s government, are not aware that the leaders of Iraq and Syria, murdered under our interventions, were tolerant of Christianity compared to their Zionist-approved successors.)

Numerous countries around the world have accused Israel of war crimes and will arrest its leader Netanyahu if he travels to their lands. The holocaust in Gaza – 70,000 slaughtered in response to the October 7 slaughter of 1200 – is one pretext for the war that has drawn the mighty United States into the vortex that pulls others into the bloodbath as well.

Offenses to the spirit and soul can be as grievous as to the body. For the first time during its occupation of Jerusalem, or that of any power, free access to holy sites has been completely denied… even, or specifically, during Holy Week. Israeli authorities blocked access to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to three clergymen – not the throng of pilgrims who traditionally gather to worship this week at the spot believed to be where Jesus was crucified and buried, but merely three priests. They were willing to comply with the edict even to broadcast their modest ceremony to the world. But they could not. “Security concerns,” yet the priests were willing to risk falling shrapnel or whatever the police “protected” them from.

Muslims were prevented with similar restrictions from entering the Al-Aqsa Mosque (a familiar ban) but 50 rabbis at a time are permitted to remove slips of paper from the Wailing Wall, an annual event at the old Roman edifice. Authorities have claimed to be reconsidering these bans on Christian worship, but the pilgrims will be prevented from retracing Jesus’s Walk where He carried His cross. These pilgrims are willing to face death, as Jesus did, to exercise their faith, but Israel wants to shield them from stray bombs, it says. (I am waiting for a “stray bomb” to somehow find its way to the Dome of Rock, so Israel may conveniently build its “Third Temple” in its place. (Christians – like the American so-called Christian Zionists mentioned above – have forgotten that Jesus declared Himself to be the Temple of prophecy, the fulfilled Seed of Abraham, not a new building).

In the meantime, returning to the nearby “yesterday” of history, how can we ignore the similarities between the persecution of Christ and His followers in that first Holy Week and current events? How can we not hear the guttural demands of crowds who ignore the many evidences of fulfilled prophecies before their eyes? – any convenient Barabbas will do today. Jesus is still being persecuted by those who have not given up; the main difference today is that multitudes of those who call themselves Christians are complicit! Heads of state, even of largely secular countries, have condemned Israel, but the American Ambassador Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister, has only called the closing of the Holy Sites an “unfortunate over-reach.” Neither has President Trump condemned the bans.

Ecco Homo – “Behold the man,” Pontius Pilate said in a futile attempt to change the minds of the Jewish mob as Jesus’s death was demanded. This year, can we put aside bunnies and Easter-egg hunts and imagine, through space and time, whether we too would be spitting at the Prince of Peace, or serving Him. We still have that choice.

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Click: Please Bring Peace to Palestine

3-9-26

Jesus taught about “wars and rumors of wars.” In Matthew 24 we find His warnings not only of events to expect, but the contexts we should anticipate.

At no time in recent memory have we confronted such real wars, virtual wars, threats of war, proxy wars, excuses for war, and euphemisms for war. Oh, and deadly, bloody, wars that are sanitized and marketed as righteous.

In all these regards I will invite the words of Jesus Himself into this message. He referred to the End Times, speaking to His disciples but also, of course, to believers today:

… The disciples came to Him privately, asking… “What will be the sign of Your coming, and of the end of the age?” And Jesus said to them: “Take heed that no one deceives you. For many will come in My name, saying, ‘I am the Christ,’ and will deceive many. And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not troubled; for all these things must come to pass, but the End is not yet.

“For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. And there will be famines, pestilences, and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of sorrows. Then they will deliver you up to tribulation and kill you, and you will be hated by all nations for My name’s sake.

“And then many will be offended, will betray one another, and will hate one another. Then many false prophets will rise up and deceive many. And because lawlessness will abound, the love of many will grow cold. But he who endures to the end shall be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations, and then the end will come….

“See, I have told you beforehand…. Watch therefore, for you do not know what hour your Lord is coming.”

There is much to learn here! Jesus foretells – He promises, not hints – of many, many things; signs of the End Times, of believers being deceived, of natural calamities and man-made disasters, and of… wars and rumors of wars. That situation seems to confront us today.

“Rumors” do not only mean gossip and speculation. The rumors today consist of wars we know only from TV and from marketing campaigns; that is, propaganda. Wars begun under false pretenses. Wars supported by populations who cannot correctly identify the issues at play.

Today – to address the Iran War – I assert that many Americans cannot intelligently defend their support of Israel in this conflict, nor acknowledge that America’s foreign policy has been hostage to Israel’s for years. That Israel has maintained false claims to “God’s promises” for years, despite the Bible’s definition of “Abraham’s seed” and Christ being the fulfillment of that inheritance (please see my three essays here from Dec 6-13 of 2025). That American Evangelicals have been complicit in Gazan genocide, the holocaust of our day.

Western Civilization has lived through such periods as the Thirty Years’ War, the Hundred Years’ War, even the “Phony War” at the commencement of World War II. A “rumor” certainly can mean a theory or an interpretation too. German, Soviet, and Chinese governments provoked local populations to justify military interventions. The United States clearly has done this in hemispheric situations, and to topple governments in Central Europe. History might record the past 75 years as the Era of False Flags.

Countries that have staged attacks on allies, or even themselves, have filled history books. Today, analysts and podcasts are rife with commentaries about Israeli terrorism against the British in the 1940s; about the 1953 Lavon Affair, where Israel recruited Egyptian Jews to bomb American targets and blame Muslims; about Israel’s lethal bombing of the USS Liberty by air and torpedoes; hundreds of deaths of the American Marines in Lebanon; since-debunked rationales behind American attacks on Libya and Iraq; countless reports that Iran has been “moments away” from developing nuclear weapons. All possible False Flags committed by Israel and/or the United States. Some analysts even suspect that Israel was behind the 9-11 attack.

Most recently, the “October 7” attack was a possible False-Flag pretext for Israel to ethnic-cleanse and occupy Gaza as part of its oft-stated goal of a Greater Israel that would stretch from the Mediterranean to the Nile and Euphrates rivers and into Turkey. It sounds absurd except for its endorsement by Netanyahu and Israeli leaders. Some analysts give credence to the suggestion of False Flags, pointing out that Israel can pinpoint missiles over 1200 miles to individual homes and a specific floor of a high-rise office building, but it “never noticed” the construction of hundreds of miles of tunnels, the removal of tons of dirt, etc., on its border with Gaza over the course of years.

What further possibilities are ahead? That is, what should we discern about plausible events – Israel and the US encouraging Kurds to attempt (again) independence by joining the war, which would draw their host countries Turkey (a NATO ally that Israel recently has threatened), Iraq, and Syria into the Iran War. It would push the current conflict towards a world war. Plausible too would be the “accidental” destruction of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the second holiest Moslem site which Israel recently has closed and where Zionists seek to build the “Third Temple” in its place. Conspiracies, rumors – or prophecy?

False Flags… real deaths… false history vs current reality… these are among the things Jesus warned of. Even false assertions have real consequences. Deadly. For innocent people (the guilty often insulate themselves) and for policies. We are still a democracy, but have trouble learning the truth because of distortions and manipulations of corrupt media and suborned politicians. Are Jesus’s words about today? Tomorrow? The distant future…?

Thank God (literally) through the “fog of war” we have the Words of Jesus. When believers read about the Tribulation, we are chillingly reminded that things in this world might get much worse before the actual End of Days arrives. He tells us to be very wary of false prophets – those who twist Scripture in pursuit of political ends. He stated that we can be tempted to think the Rapture, or some Divine intervention, might be at hand.

… or not. Jesus’s prophecies mix warnings and reassurances. We must watch, and wait; to be ready. In the twinkling of an eye peace, or war, might come… and — always — rumors of war. Whether we be wary or nervous, optimistic or pessimistic about End Times, our best position as informed Christians is to stand on His Word… and be on our knees in prayer.

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Click: The Great Judgment Morning