<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Village SDA Church

Ron Kelly

The United States Attorney General, Democracy, Prophecy, and the Future Religious Liberty

Lord, thank you for the glory of this morning to see your Church doing more than it's done before.

And I'm asking, Lord, that we'll change our priorities and our focus in such a way that our words and actions will line up together with the knowledge that we're living near the reproach and the return of Jesus.

Prepare the hearts that will hear it, prepare the heart that will preach it.

And I do pray, make it a divine worship hour, I ask now in Jesus' name, amen.

All right, this morning I wanna talk with you about something very important.

On Friday, October 11, the United States Attorney General, the highest law enforcement officer, lawyer for our country, made a speech at Notre Dame.

That speech has elicited all kinds of fervor and fervor.

And this morning I've entitled my message, United States Attorney General, Democracy, Prophecy, and the future of religious liberty.

Now I'm going to tell you what I'm going to do and then I'm going to do it so you don't get confused because I'm going to share a lot of history today.

I'm going to show you how Revelation 13, it talks about 2 beasts.

It's a beast that comes up out of the sea and persecutes God's people for 1260 years.

That beast is unequivocally, not by Seventh-day Adventist invention or definition, but by Protestant exposition of the Word of God, and by myriad dozens and hundreds and thousands of preachers, pastors, and scholars through the last 500 years, that beast without animus and without any negative intent to anyone that's a member of this church represents a little horned power from Daniel chapter 7 which is the papacy.

My family has very distinct Catholic ties.

My father was raised as a Roman Catholic, loosely.

I have a wonderful aunt, practicing Catholic lady.

This has nothing to do with people but it has something to do with prophecy, intent, and history.

Now, the other beast in Revelation 13 is a lamb-like beast that appears on the scene while the first beast is being wounded.

The beast that was an oppressive beast, that dictated conscience, that ruled Through civic power and allowed for no religious liberty, that beast, the papacy, was wounded about 200 years into the Protestant Reformation when Napoleon took the Pope and imprisoned 2 of them.

Some wondered about the future of the Catholic Church.

At that very same time in the end of the 18th century, the 1700s, there's a new country arriving on the scene.

It will make allowance for religious liberty like no nation ever on the face of the earth has done.

There were republics before and there were democracies, but there were not republics and democracies like America that wove into the fabric of their constitutional law protection for religious freedom.

This makes America unique in the history of the world.

Now what I'm going to show you is that from the time of the deadly wound in 1798, I'm going to show you the trajectory of papal history and its attempt to reconstitute its authority and its power.

I'm going to show you how America becomes great while the papacy is losing power and how America starts becoming immoral and godless and indulgent while the papacy is regaining power.

I'm going to show you all this this morning with a purpose.

When they take that doomsday clock and they move it closer to midnight back and forth, that has to do with all things non-religious.

But I'm here this morning to tell you the clock is ticking down I know America has been good to most of us and I know we really love our ease and our comfort But I'm telling you today we are to start planning for our heavenly inheritance God is coming back What he said would come true is coming true.

The word of the prophets is more sure than even what we've read already that's happened.

God has it planned out and it's happening.

So What I'm really saying to you is, parents, you can't be too busy to memorize those Sabbath school verses, you can't be too busy to do your Sabbath school lesson, by the way, take a cue from the Spirit of Prophecy.

This is what Ellen White suggested to do with your families.

Study the entire Sabbath school lesson on Sabbath afternoon together, And then you can talk about it through the week.

And by the time your kids show up at Sabbath school, man, they'll have something to say because they'll have found out that their parents and the Bible are the most exciting dialogues that can be had and the Spirit gets in the midst, and it's very, very wonderful.

Psalm 46, Psalm 91, they're both psalms that we've been directed to memorize in anticipation of the trouble that's coming.

And if you weren't here for my presentation last Saturday night on the 7 last plagues and the battle of Armageddon.

You need to understand when Daniel sees in Daniel 12, verse 1, that Michael stands up when a time of trouble is coming on the earth, you need to know what it is, and you need to know how it's going to turn out.

But I'm going to tell you the short version right now so nobody goes away worried.

The real trouble are for those who don't have Michael standing up for them.

The devil's tried to do a little end run on Seventh-day Adventists and make them afraid of what's coming.

The people that need to be afraid are the ones that don't know they need to be afraid and need to be told there's a saving A haven there's a sanctuary.

There's an ark for them to come into it's a relationship with God He knows his own and he takes care of his own.

All right, let's go All right pendulum swing Some of you have clocks in your houses that are still not completely electronic.

When the pendulum goes like this, and at night when nobody's around, you can hear it ticking, and you can hear it talking.

I'm gonna be talking to you this morning about pendulum swing.

The papacy over-exerted its influence and actually created a backlash in the form of the Reformation.

Nobody wanted to work away from the Mother Church, but its oppression, its absolutely over-arching oppression created it, and you got a backlash.

Now we see that the papacy looks like it's about to fall and when the papacy attempts to come back the pendulum swings way over.

I'm going to show you this in this sermon.

And finally I'm going to show you liberty.

This American country was birthed on the idea of freedom and rule of the people.

It pushed the pendulum way over here, but all of their license and all their liberty has led to licentiousness and debauchery and self-indulgence.

And so we're imploding on a moral social level and the pendulum swinging way over here now.

But what I'm here to tell you, there's 1 more pendulum swing that's coming.

And that pendulum swing will be when we consider the weightiness of societal ills too great for all the freedoms we've been announcing and proclaiming.

It's a system of government by the whole population of eligible members.

Now we don't have a pure democracy in the sense that every time there's a decision to be made, all 300 million of us don't get together and vote.

We have a Republican form of democracy where we elect people that represent us.

And there's a little bit of a disconnect between the raw vote of the people and the actual enactment of law.

It's done by people who have usually a higher level of education and social status.

Most Americans, including many of us, would be surprised to learn the word democracy is not in the Declaration or the Constitution.

Constitutional republic is a form of indirect democracy where representatives are elected and the rules are set down in a written constitution.

John Adams said that a constitutional republic was a government Of what?

That's very important because in the end of the day, law and obedience and respect of law is what keeps our society safe.

Now we all know that some 400 years ago, there was a effort to achieve at great personal sacrifice, liberty.

And so these pilgrims, many of who died on the way and many more who have died when they got here, risked life, limb, fortune, and future, and yet they were hoping for a better future, and they established this country.

They believe that whenever the state seeks to enforce religious beliefs on its citizens, persecution results.

That's why they're on the beach there at the Massachusetts Bay.

In our Constitution, it says no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof shall be made.

The Bible tells us of this lamb-like beast.

Remember, I described 2 beasts in the book of Revelation chapter 13.

I have not created the identity of the first.

Now, the identity of the second is the United States of America is not all is not only shared by myself and those of my religious faith either.

But the interpretation that I'm going to show you here today is probably somewhat unique to my Seventh-day Adventist faith.

I saw another beast coming up out of the earth.

He had 2 horns like a lamb and he spoke like a dragon.

For the last 200 and some years, we've experienced primarily lamb-like dynamics, but there is a dragon dynamic on the way.

We know that in Bible prophecy, according to Revelation 17, the sea represents peoples and populated places.

Back to Menu

The United States Attorney General, Democracy, Prophecy, and the Future Religious Liberty

Transcript

Sponsor

Recorded

Sound Doctrine