The World Gets Worse, But Victory Is Just Ahead

Depths of Pentecost ^ | August 11, 2018 | Philip Cottraux

[pcottraux]

The World Gets Worse, But Victory Is Just Ahead

By Philip Cottraux

August is interesting. As summer draws to a close, the days get shorter and the shadows longer, and one starts to expect cooler temperatures. Technically the temperatures are higher in July, but August feels hotter. The sun seems brighter and the hot air is somehow more searing as it beats down on you. Summer almost seems to throw out everything it has, burning hotter than ever in its dying gasps.

The same thing happens every March. After three long months of bitter cold, I can’t wait for spring to start. Yet unexpectedly, March hammers the world with freak snowstorms as winter goes out kicking and screaming. Spring always seems to arrive in the aftermath of a world rebuilding from a frozen apocalypse. It’s surreal to look out the window at green grass and blooming flowers and imagine all this was covered with snow only a few weeks before.

The Civil War was the deadliest conflict in American history. If you add together every American killed in every war, almost half of the number are Civil War casualties. There are all sorts of complicated reasons why the body count at each battle was so staggering. The nation didn’t expect a bloody conflict at first; both sides were convinced an easy victory lay ahead. Bull Run was the first major battle, but the real wakeup call that shocked the nation was at Shiloh the following year, with 20,000 deaths (equivalent to Waterloo) and no real accomplishment on either side. Antietam was the single bloodiest day of the war at over 23,000 dead. Gettysburg would be the bloodiest battle of the war, at a total of more than 50,000 killed over a three-day period.

While many consider Gettysburg to be the “turning point” of the Civil War (I personally disagree with that), by 1864 it was clear that the Confederacy was a lost cause. Once Sherman and Grant took command of the Union Army and divided their forces, Sherman heading for Atlanta and Grant for Richmond, the South had reached a point of no return. One would think that a sense of relief would come over the nation as victory seemed inevitable. But in reality, the most savage days of the war were yet ahead. Most people don’t realize that the bloodiest campaign of the war was the Overland Campaign (also known as the Wilderness Campaign), which took 80,000 lives in a matter of two months. Grant and Lee were a cat-and-mouse game in the backwoods of Virginia, Grant’s army slowly clawing its way to Richmond. As the Union inched its way to the Confederate capital, the increasingly desperate South threw every resource it had into its own survival.

The end of the war was in sight by the time Grant and Sherman had Lee cornered at Petersburg. Rather than take Richmond head-on, they decided to take the city with a vital rail line south of the capital. The rest of the Southern states had effectively fallen. The long siege of Petersburg was the last stand of the once proud Confederate army. It also saw one of the earliest examples of trench warfare. When the city finally fell and the Rebels fled, the Union army discovered boys as young as 13 among the dead they left behind.

World War II follows this same phenomenon. The early days of the war were certainly terrible. While the blitzkrieg or the Japanese invasion of China made their marks on history, the real horror began once the Allied victory was inevitable. Despite the success of D-Day, Hitler’s war machine wasn’t going down without a fight. As the Third Reich was slowly beaten back, the fighting got more extreme and desperate. The Nazis began recruiting children to fight, and the Hitler Youth were some of the deadliest fighters of the war.

Perhaps even more sinister, however, is that Hitler could have bought himself some time by putting his “final solution” on hold. Running concentration camps and putting millions to death en masse was consuming great resources. By stopping it at least temporarily, more could be used to help the German war effort. But instead, the Holocaust got worse during the last days of the war. By the time American armies crossed into the German heartland, concentration camps were at maximum capacity. Conditions worsened and the scores of people being exterminated accelerated. It’s almost as if, knowing the war was lost, Hitler desperately increased the efforts of the Holocaust to accomplish wiping out the Jews before the Allies could stop him.

The Pacific theater wasn’t much better. After the battle of Midway, the Japanese empire quickly deflated as U.S. forces conquered island after island. But as we got closer to Japan itself, the fighting got worse than ever. The horrors of young American soldiers being blown to pieces as they landed on the beaches of Iwo Jima and Okinawa were like nothing we had ever seen.

And even as their defeat was inevitable, Imperial Japan’s tactics only became more ruthless. Just like the Confederates and Nazis had enlisted children in a last-ditch effort to stave off defeat, Japan introduced a new terror. Children brainwashed to die for their Emperor were taught how to fly planes but not land them. A total of 47 Allied ships were sunk by these suicidal young pilots, 300 severely damaged. As many as 3,000 kamikazes died during the war.

Matthew 24:6-9: And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places. All these are the beginning of sorrows. Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill you: and ye shall be hated of all nations for my name's sake.

When Jesus was asked about the sign of His coming, He responded that there would be rumors of wars, that nation would rise up against nation, and that famine and pestilence would cover the earth. Worst of all, persecution would come against His followers.

Those who point out that people have been claiming that the Rapture is imminent for decades overlook that the Matthew 24 doesn’t just describe a period of a few years. God works on a different time scale than we do, and here Jesus literally described the twentieth century, the bloodiest hundred years in history. Christian persecution around the world has reached a fever pitch; there are more martyrs for the cause of Jesus Christ today than ever. Most of us in the U.S. fail to see this as one of Christ’s most explicit warning signs that His return is fast approaching.

Christians act like the signs of His coming indicate that the devil has complete control and is getting bolder. The Spirit of the Antichrist has been unleashed on planet Earth, no doubt. But we him more credit than he deserves. Perhaps it’s our mental state of defeat as gay marriage has long become a lost issue, and now other evils are proudly on the march. Moral decay is leading to evil behavior and mass shootings are fast becoming the norm.

The youngest generation has been on the receiving end of the devil’s wrath for years. He has successfully wiped out millions since abortion was made legal. Never in our lifetimes have we seen children exposed to more evil and wickedness on TV and the internet while parents seem oblivious. Children are brainwashed at school into accepting immorality early and taught to hate and punish those who stand against it. As they get older it will become impossible to rewire their brains to undo the damage.

The devil is using them the same way the Confederates, Nazis, and Japanese did in the twilight of their respective wars. And that brings me to my next point: just because he seems bolder doesn’t mean he’s winning. It’s the greatest sign that he’s losing fast. God’s war against the devil is coming to an end; and the closer the Lord gets to victory, the more vicious and extreme the devil will become. He’s desperately throwing out every tactic he can while God’s army closes in on him. It’s hard for us to see in the grand scheme of things. It would have been hard to believe in the trenches of Petersburg, the snowy fields of the Battle of the Bulge, or the jungles of Okinawa how close victory was.

And it’s only going to get worse. Once the trumpet sounds and we’re taken out of here, Satan will be given free reign to wreak havoc on the world like never before. Matthew 24:21: For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be. But even those seven years will really be his desperate final stand before Christ returns at Armageddon to obliterate him once and for all. And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years, And cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled: and after that he must be loosed a little season (Revelation 20:2-3).

The question is, which side will you be on? And when these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh (Luke 21:28).

[pcottraux]

I'm already bracing for the FReepers who are going to take me to task on some nitpicky historical figure I got wrong. But I think my point was made well enough.

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[pcottraux]

My people are destroyed from lack of knowledge: Hosea 4:6.

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