Haitian migrants use a dam to cross to and from the United States from Mexico to Del Rio, Texas on Friday. Eric Gay/AP
“We are Republicans, and don’t propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents have been rum, Romanism, and rebellion. We are loyal to our flag.”
– Dr. Samuel D. Burchard, Presbyterian Minister and Union Civil War Veteran
The account of David’s fight with Goliath is, doubtless, the most famous case of singly combat ever. Many people, even if they have never so much as opened a Bible have heard of their duel.
But while the history of what took place is justifiably famous, there is at least one important detail that is often overlooked. We read how Goliath was wont to come out and taunt Israel and how he, in so many words, double dog dared anyone from Israel’s army to come out and have a go at him one on one.
Now among those present in Israel’s army was King Saul. But even he would not dare to challenge Goliath.
If you stop and think about it, that must have been very demoralizing to the Israelites. After all, a few years prior the Israelites had demanded a king to fight their battles for them like all the other nations. Well, Israel had its king, but the king wasn’t doing his job. He wasn’t leading Israel to victory in battle. Quite the opposite. He was cowering behind the lines at Goliath’s words just like everyone else.
And it got worse.
It wasn’t as if Goliath came out once or twice, got bored with disrespecting Israel, and gave up. No, not at all. If you’ve ever been picked on by a playground bully as a kid, you probably received advice such as, “Just ignore him and he’ll go away.” Sometimes maybe that’s true. But what if the bully doesn’t go away? What if the bully comes back day after day to torment you?
The Apostle Paul in writing to the Romans notes, “If it is possible, as much as depends on you, live peaceably with all men.” By saying “as much as it depends on you,” Paul acknowledges that living peaceably with others does not depend solely on you. Sometimes there are men who want to have a go at you for one reason or another, those who like to pick fights.
Goliath was one such man. And he wasn’t the sort of fellow to just go away.
No. The Scriptures tell us that Goliath would come out and say, “I defy the armies of Israel this day; give me a man, that we may fight together.” And this, Scripture tells us, he did for forty days both in the morning and in the evening.
So twice a day for forty days, Goliath “defied” the armies of Israel. And no one did anything. Not Saul. Not David’s elder brothers. No one.
Rather, we read, “When Saul and all Israel heard these words of the Philistine, they were dismayed and greatly afraid.”
Not very inspiring, that.
Into this courage, leadership, and ultimately faith gap strode David, who famously, by God’s grace, won the day.
Today’s American Protestants More Like Saul than Like David
Now you may wonder why I started a column on the Babylonian Harlot’s – the Babylonian Harlot or Mystery, Babylon the Great as the Apostle John called the Roman Catholic Church-State (RCCS) in Revelation 17 – attack on the United States of America by talking about David and Goliath.
My point is this, that when I look at the reaction of today’s American Protestant church to the obvious, in-your-face predations of the RCCS, I am reminded more of Saul’s reaction to the giant than David’s.
It seems that the more Antichrist – the office of the papacy is the Antichrist and Son of Perdition we read about in the new testament – and his Harlot Church attack America, the more God’s people cower in fear.
Goliath loved getting in Israel’s face. He loved playing the bully. And it all was going great for him until one day it suddenly didn’t. But it took a man of faith and courage to put an end to Goliath’s proud defiance of God’s people.
In like fashion, the RCCS and its Antichrist pope love getting in the face of American Protestants. Since it’s football season, I’ll use a football metaphor. It’s as if Rome is spiking the football in our face and doing a touchdown dance, and no one does anything to put a stop to it.
The pope and his bishops, cardinals, priests, and nuns lecture American Christians constantly about their (supposed) moral duty to destroy their own nation through mass welfare migration, immigration, and refugee resettlement of people, many of whom are difficult if not impossible to assimilate. And not only is there a moral duty, these liars tell us, for Americans to take in the people, but we have an obligation to pay for our own dispossession as well.
And what do we hear from Protestant pulpits about this shameful, daily dissing of our faith of the nation our forefathers built?
Crickets for the most part.
But it gets even worse.
In some cases, putatively Protestant teachers actually internalize Rome’s immigration lies and begin spouting the same socialist, nation-destroying immigration nonsense as do the popes, cardinals, bishops, priests, and nuns of Rome.
Now it may well be, and I’m of a mind to believe that it is the case this day in America, that there are 7,000 in Israel who have not bowed the knee to Baal.
But I think we need to look in the mirror and ask ourselves, what are we going to do now that the Harlot Church and her pope are in our face? Are we going to be as Saul and his men and be dismayed and greatly afraid?
Now there are reasons, ultimately not good ones, but reasons nonetheless, to be afraid.
First, there is a lack of knowledge. God said, “My people perish for lack of knowledge.” And we see this every day here in America. If not literally perishing, many Christians, perhaps even people who sense that there’s something seriously wrong with an immigration system that threatens to replace the historic majority population of this county, lack the ideas to adequately express their concerns.
Even in Bible-believing churches, it’s a rare day that you will ever hear any overt criticism of the RCCS or its false gospel. It’s a rare day indeed that you’ll hear the pope identified as the Antichrist of the New Testament in plain language of the sort used in the original Westminster Confession of Faith.
At a Bible study, I once brought up that Rome teaches the real presence of Christ in the mass. Now this being one of the most important doctrines of Rome, I would have thought that this would be a non-controversial statement. But it wasn’t. There were some people in my Bible study who actually defended Rome, denying that Rome teaches this doctrine that it very clearly does teach. I got the distinct sense that some were embarrassed that I had even brought up the point. And it wasn’t even as if I’d called the pope Antichrist! He is. But I simply brought up what Rome herself teaches in her own words and found myself met with resistance in a Protestant Bible study.
If Protestants won’t teach and believe the Reformation doctrine of Antichrist and refuse to criticize Rome for its many soul-destroying and blasphemous teachings, how can we possibly expect anyone else to do so? This is our fight. We’re it. If we don’t get the job done, who will?
Second, speaking out against Rome feels strange. We don’t see others doing it, so maybe we start to think calling out Antichrist and his Harlot Church is a sort of social “no go” zone. We’re told as children that you don’t talk about religion and politics. And talking about the evil of political Romanism is both of those things at once. It’s easier to pretend not to notice what’s going on and talk instead about the weather or sports or something like that.
Third, we can’t handle the truth. One suspects that there are Protestants who have a sense that there is something extraordinarily, preternaturally evil about Rome, but they don’t want to go there. They prefer willful blindness to the evil of the RCCS rather than doing a little research and reading on their own. It’s easier for us to play hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil rather than look at the situation as it is. Because if we know what Rome in truth is, how can we not speak out against it? And that’s dangerous. And we don’t want to go there.
I once had a Protestant minister say to me that he knew Rome was the Babylonian Harlot with a false gospel sending that sent people to hell, but he said he couldn’t speak out against it. The implication seemed to be that it would cause so much controversy in his ministry that he would lose his job.
The minister may well have been right. But that’s not a good reason to avoid criticizing Rome.
Where Has Our Cowardice Gotten Us?
So, just where has our cowardice gotten us Protestants? Has playing nice with Rome and calling the pope “Our Brother in Christ” mollified the pope or caused the Babylonian Harlot Church to stop kicking sand in our faces?
No, it has not.
If nothing else, our cowardice and unwillingness to speak out against the unbiblical, unchristian, unholy evil of Rome’s philosophy, theology, politics, and economics have simply invited more blatant attacks.
What’s going on with the migrant hordes assaulting our southern border is one of the most flagrant and in-your-face attacks by Rome this author has ever seen.
To use another comparison, Protestants today are acting much more like Neville Chamberlain than Winston Churchill, begging Rome for “peach in our time” while the Pope and his henchmen in the church and his dutiful servant in the White House assault our southern border with what is probably the single largest wave of mass, illegal immigration in our nation’s history.
Christian, do you think Rome is going to feel sorry for you? Do you think the Antichrist Jesuit Pope will have mercy on you? Do you think the US Conference of Catholic Bishops will call off their attack dogs?
No.
The more we remain silent, the more we will be attacked until all is consumed and we find ourselves strangers in the land built by our forefathers.
Reprove, Correct, and Instruct
Writing to the Ephesians, Paul said enjoined them, “And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove (or expose) them.” In 2 Timothy we’re told by Paul that all scripture is profitable for reproof, correction, and instruction.
It is high time, and well past time, for us Christians to get about our job of applying the Scriptures to the evil deeds of the RCCS. And there are so many of them.
In the past, I have thought at times that I was being overly hard on Rome. I think to myself that I had gone overboard in my criticism of their doctrine and their evil deeds, only to find out that I didn’t understand half of how evil Rome truly is.
The flagrant, in your face evil of what’s being done to Texas with the flood of migrants, and the weak to nonexistent response from the American Protestant church is disgraceful. Paul ordered the Corinthians to “in understanding be men.” Yet far too often, we Protestants prefer to remain as children.
I realize I’ve been hard on my fellow believers in this post. But seriously, enough is enough.
It has come down to this. Either God’s people trust in him, believe his Word, and apply it to Rome’s evil economic and political philosophy and practices, or we lose our nation.
It’s really that simple.
May the Lord grant that we make the wise choice and follow him.
“We are Republicans, and don’t propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents have been rum, Romanism and rebellion. We are loyal to our flag.”
Dr. Samuel D. Burchard, 1884
Many Americans, if they have ever heard the quote about “rum, Romanism and rebellion,” have little or no idea about the context in which it was said or the object to which it was applied. It had something to do with someone at some time way back when.
Those who know of the origin of the quote and the object at which it was directed – it was the Democrats that Burchard, a Presbyterian minister, tagged as the party of rum, Romanism and rebellion – mostly consider it to have been an impolitic gaffe that cost Republican presidential candidate James G. Blaine the 1884 election in which he was running against Democrat Grover Cleveland.
When reading contemporary commentary on Burchard’s famous alliterative triad, what one finds universal condemnation of it. No one, at least no one that this author has read, seems to consider the possibility that Burchard was right.
But he was right in 1884 and he is right today.
The Democrats have been and are the party of rum, Romanism and rebellion. In the opinion of this author, they proved it once again earlier this month with massive election rigging that, when the dust has all settled, may leave them in control of the House, the Senate and the White House.
Over the past few weeks, there has been a great deal of commentary on various ways the Democrats may have cheated. On the other hand, there are those, not all of them Democrats, who claim that there was no cheating, or at least no cheating that made any real difference, in the 2020 election results, that Joe Biden is the legitimate winner, and that those who say otherwise are making baseless claims and are peddling conspiracy theories.
It is the aim of this and subsequent posts to lay out the reasons this author believes that the 2020 presidential election was rigged by the Democrats, that Joe Biden is not the winner, and that Donald Trump rightfully won the White House.
Pope Francis, flanked by Vice President Joe Biden and House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio, waves to the crowd on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Sept. 24, 2015, as they stand on the Speaker’s Balcony on Capitol Hill, after the pope addressed a joint meeting of Congress inside. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
“I will venture to make some specific predictions…The alliance between neo-evangelicals and Romanists in the Culture Wars will…result in the election of our second Romanist president.”
In April 1927, The Atlantic ran a story titled “An Open Letter to the Honorable Alfred E. Smith.” It’s a remarkable letter, the sort of thing one would never see today from any publication of national note. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a supposedly Christian publication running such a piece in 2020.
The letter is remarkable in that it openly questions whether Al Smith, a leading contender for, and eventual winner of, the 1928 Democratic presidential nomination would be able to support and defend the Constitution of the United States in light of his Roman Catholic faith.
The open letter, written by attorney Charles C. Marshall, raised a number of important points, asking how Smith could reconcile the political and economic pronouncements of the Roman Church-State (RCS) with America’s Constitution.
Time does not permit me to go through all of Marshall’s arguments, but the following two paragraphs are representative.
It is indeed true that a loyal and conscientious Roman Catholic could and would discharge his oath of office with absolute fidelity to his moral standards. As to that in general, and as to you in particular, your fellow citizens entertain no doubt. But those moral standards differ essentially from the moral standards of all men not Roman Catholics. They are derived from the basic political doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church, asserted against repeated challenges for fifteen hundred years, that God has divided all power over men between the secular State and that Church. Thus Pope Leo XIII, in 1885, in his encyclical letter on The Christian Constitution of States, says: ‘The Almighty has appointed the charge of the human race, between two powers, the ecclesiastical and the civil, the one being set over divine, and the other over human things.’
The deduction is inevitable that, as all power over human affairs not given to the State by God, is given by God to the Roman Catholic Church, no other churches or religious or ethical societies have in theory any direct power from God and are without direct divine sanction, and therefore without natural right to function on the same basis as the Roman Catholic Church in the religious and moral affairs of the State. The result is that that Church, if true to her basic political doctrine, is hopelessly committed to that intolerance that has disfigured so much of her history. This is frankly admitted by Roman Catholic authorities.
“And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.”
– Revelation 18:4
In part one of this series the point was made that the voice from heaven in Revelation 18:4 – the voice being most probably that of God the Father or perhaps of Christ, since it refers to “my people” – issued one command and two purposes. The command was to “come out of her” meaning to come out of the Mother of Harlots city, which we identified as Rome papal.
To this command, the Apostle John tells us that the voice from heaven appended two purposes. The first purpose, “that ye be not partakers of her sins,” we looked at last week in part 2 of this series. One way in which Roman Catholics sin is by associating themselves with, and lending support to, the corrupt and heretical teachers of the Roman Church-State (RCS). When men support that organization with their time and their money and receive her priests and bishops and popes as if they were Christian teachers, Roman Catholic laymen become guilty of their enormous sins by association (2 John 10). Since the impetus for this series on Rome was yet another Roman Catholic pedophile scandal, this time in Michigan, it was also mentioned that a second way in which Roman Catholics partake in the sins of Rome is by deliberately delivering their children into the hands of a group of known predators, I’m referring here to Roman Catholic priests, who of all have shown themselves the least trustworthy when it comes to care of children. Indeed, so far from being trustworthy are they, that one could reasonably assert that, of all classes of men, Romanist priests pose the greatest threat to children.
Given the shocking scale of the enormities visited by Roman Catholic priests upon the Church’s children – and this, at least for the moment, is leaving aside the Church’s many other abuse scandals, for example, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s sexual abuse of seminarians and the stories now surfacing about nuns who have committed sexual abuse of minors – one wonders how any conscientious parent could elect to leave his children alone with a priest even for a moment. Yet Roman Catholic parents routinely and willingly deliver their children into the arms of those who prey upon them. In doing this, they sin.
Turing now from a review of what we’ve already studied, let us look at the second purpose uttered by the voice from heaven in Revelation 18:4, “that ye receive not of her plagues.”
Demonstrator holds up sign in front of Pope Francis during his visit to Ireland, August 2018. Will Oliver (EFE)
“And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.”
– Revelation 18:4
“US Catholic Church reports big rise in sex-abuse allegations,” ran the AP headline on Friday. In a way, this latest announcement by the U.S. Roman Catholic church seemed to underscore the point I began to make in last week’s post about the horrifying scale of the Antichrist Roman Church-State’s pedophilia problem. Then again, with announcement after announcement of new and horrific enormities committed by Roman Catholic priests seeming to hit the news wires every week, a jaded individual may be tempted to say, “well, it’s business as usual.”
According to the AP story,
During the period from July 1, 2017, to June 30, 2018, 1,385 adults came forward with 1,455 allegations of abuse, according to the annual report of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Secretariat of Child and Youth Protection. That was up from 693 allegations in the previous year. The report attributed much of the increase to a victim compensation program implemented in five dioceses in New York state.
According to the report, Catholic dioceses and religious orders spent $301.6 million during the reporting period on payments to victims, legal fees and child-protection efforts. That was up 14% from the previous year and double the amount spent in the 2014 fiscal year.
As horrific as these numbers are, they apparently do not include the findings of the Pennsylvania Grand Jury concerning the sexual abuse of children in six dioceses – according to the Washington Post, “The lengthy [Grand Jury] report identified about 1,000 children who were victims but concluded there were probably thousands more. ‘Priests were raping little boys and girls, and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing; they hid it all. For decades.’ ” – since the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report was not released until August, after the June 30, 2018 reporting period end.
The report says nothing about the activities of Theodore Edgar McCarrick, the disgraced former Cardinal, because the allegations against him were not with respect to the abuse of children, but of adult seminarians.
Likewise, the report includes nothing about the sexual abuse scandal in Illinois that made headlines in December 2018. According to the New York Times,
The Catholic Church in Illinois withheld the name of at least 500 priests accused of sexual abuse of minors, the state’s attorney general said Wednesday in a scathing report that accused the church of failing victims by neglecting to investigate their allegations.
The preliminary report by Attorney General Lisa Madigan concludes that the Catholic dioceses in Illinois are incapable of investigating themselves and “will not resolve the clergy sexual abuse crisis on their own.”
The report said that 690 priests were accused of abuse, and only 185 names were made public by the dioceses as having been found credibly accused of abuse.
“The number of allegations above what was already public is shocking,” said Ms. Madigan in an interview.
Finally, the report does not include the victims of Catholic priest abuse in Michigan, which is the story that prompted me to address this issue in the first place. That story indicates that five priests in the state were indicted for sexual abuse of minors and quoted Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel saying that the five cases were “the tip of the iceberg.” The story notes that investigators in the state were in the process of tracking down hundreds of tip about abuse by Catholic priests.
The story in the Detroit Free Press is very explicit, so I recommend caution when reading it. Just to give you a flavor of what went on, one priest is charged with abusing a 10-year-old boy, providing him with alcohol and cigarettes, and also threatening to kill him if he told anyone.
Michigan Deputy Solicitor General Ann Sherman expressed dismay at the attitudes of some of the hierarchy, noting that one priest attempted to put the blame for the abuse on the victims. Said Sherman, “This attitude is horrific. Sexual abuse is never the fault of the victim and it certainly can never be that sexual abuse of a child is a child’s fault.”
One struggles to come up with sufficient words of outrage when it comes to the attitudes and the actions of the Roman Catholic clergy in the instances listed above. And then to think that these represent but a tiny fraction of what has gone on in just one country – the mind reels.
I could go on much longer, but lest we lose sight of the passage at hand, let us now turn to consider how the child abuse horror can be related to Revelation 18:4.
Demonstrator holds up sign in front of Pope Francis during his visit to Ireland, August 2018. Will Oliver (EFE)
“And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.”
Indeed, investigations revealing the horrifying scale of the sex abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church-State have become something of a commonplace in recent years. Time would fail me were I to even attempt to cover, if but briefly, the scandals that have occurred just here in America, let alone try to talk about those in other countries.
As I read through the article – please note, the piece in the Detroit Free Press is, in parts, quite graphic, as it contains language from the affidavits connected with the case; in reading them one is reminded of what the Apostle Paul said to the Ephesians when he wrote to them concerning deeds about which it was shameful even to speak – I kept thinking about the passage in Revelation, where the voice from heaven warns God’s people to come out of Mystery Babylon, the Mother of Harlots, that is to say, the Roman Church-State (RCS), “that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that you receive not of her plagues.”
But not only did I think about unspeakable wickedness of the RCS, but also about the thunderous silence that emanates from the pulpits of even Bible believing Protestant churches concerning the predations of Rome against the most vulnerable of her people. If you think I’m overstating the case, as yourself this, When was the last time you heard a sermon from the pulpit about Antichrist, about Mystery Babylon, and about the work these tools of Satan are doing right in front of our faces? When was the last time you hear a Protestant minister publicly point out the sins of the Roman Church-State or warn his flock about the dangers of this false church?
The answer, most likely, is never.
Jesus enjoined his disciples to go into all the world and to teach all the things he had taught them. Paul said he was innocent of the blood of all men, because he did not fail to teach the Ephesians the whole counsel of God. Since part of the whole counsel of God is the Bible’s teaching about Antichrist and about Mystery Babylon, when ministers to fail to teach about these topics, or to teach about them falsely, the necessary conclusion is that they – and I’m taking here not about liberal ministers who long ago abandoned any pretense of teaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ, but those who would be considered conservative and Bible-believing – are blood guilty for their failure to properly instruct both their congregations and the unbelieving world.
Antichrist is alive and well, and the evil fruits of his evil doctrines are splashed across the headlines all over the internet, yet we Christians remain silent. Why is this? Ignorance is likely one reason. But perhaps more than ignorance, it is out of fear that we remain silent. Fear that we will be rejected. Fear that we will give offense. Fear that me will not hear us and will not like us. Fear of losing our jobs and fear of being censored on the internet. Fear that we will be called haters and intolerant. Fear of being banned from Facebook and Twitter and YouTube.
To all this, Jesus says “Fear not.” It is he who is our king, and it is to him that we owe our allegiance. It is he who warned his disciples not to fear those who could kill the body only, that is to say, other men, but to fear him who can destroy body and soul in hell, that is to say, God.
With this in mind, let us take a closer look at today’s Scripture passage, Revelation 8:4, and see how it relates to the horrible headlines of sex abuse in the Roman Church-State that we so often see.