9/11 - NEW BOOKLET

During this week we will be putting on the website the material which forms a new booklet called “The Contemporary Countdown to Chaos – The Ten Years Since 9/11”. The Home Page will announce when it is actually on the site. You can, however, obtain the booklet now (free) by requesting a copy (give your postal address) at mail@understandingthetimes.org.uk It’s several months since I mentioned in this column a desire to produce this; it has not been an easy process, but at last it’s here.

It takes its inspiration from a pamphlet I wrote in c. 2003 called “Countdown to Chaos”. The pamphlet was a study of what happened to Israel in the intervening years between Amos’ warning of the devastation and exile of Israel, and the fulfilment of that warning some 20 years later. The study revealed a serious deterioration in the moral, political and social life of the nation during the countdown to that cataclysmic event. I suggested it might well point to the kind of deterioration we would see in our own nation, since we ourselves have been under a severe word of warning since the turn of this new century. This new booklet examines the decade from 9/11 to see whether a similar deterioration has been taking place in our own experience. The evidence that we are on such a downward slope is overwhelming.


The scope of the booklet is actually wider that our own nation, arguing that the western world makes up a group of nations all of which are under judgement in the same way that all the nations surrounding Israel were under the same judgement that Amos declared in his day. We see the U.S.A. as the primary nation of the group, and deterioration clearly written in her history.


The biblical features of the deterioration were 1. Futile Foreign Ventures; 2. Accelerated economic and social decline; 3. Political Corruption, Incompetence and Strife. 4. The Exclusion of God and Moral Degradation. The last decade is examined in the light of these features. It is, therefore, something of an historical survey (though brief). I make no apology for that, however, since we are living at a time when it is very important that we have in one hand the Bible and in the other an account of the times in which we are living. If we do not have the latter we may well be blinded to some very important aspects of the former.


I think it is providential that this booklet has been delayed until the tenth anniversary of 9/11. That event was the defining moment of the decade and, at least in one respect, set the agenda for the decade. The booklet looks at that issue. 9/11 was one of the most devastating prophetic statements that one could ever imagine of what was to come in the U.S. and the West. The tragedy is that, whilst it was accurately seen as a defining, world-changing moment, its prophetic significance has never been either seen of acknowledged. I would like to follow up that issue next week.


Bob


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