Imagine if you will, that World War II did not end in an Allied Victory with tickertape parades and sailors kissing nurses. What if the Third Reich had pulled us into a stalemate by not invading the Soviet Union, but focusing their entire energy and inventories into Western Europe first?
What if they had managed to create a breakthrough in atomic energy ahead of the US? What if they effectively blockaded Great Britain's coastline with mines and submarine warfare and holding the tiny island nation hostage? Imagine what Hitler would have done with the power of an atom bomb?
Now imagine a seasoned Nazi state some 60 years in the making. As terrible a regime as the Third Reich was, imagine them with our modern technology at their disposal. The Holocaust would not have ended in 1945, but would be an ongoing process of ethnic cleansing ridding the world of one undesirable after another. Extermination camps would litter the European map just as North Korean and Chinese prison camps do in their countries today.
Luckily for us, the history books tell a different story. In the end, the Reich lay in tattered pieces and Hitler succumbed to his own madness in a bunker in Berlin. The West cheered and the East reorganized, and the rest is as they say...is history.
The More Things Change...
But underlying all of the worlds' periods of war and peace, simmers a dark undercurrent of evil that slips about through all the different ages of man. The same one who caused Judas to betray his Christ, also moved through the various Caesar's to bring the hammer down on the fledgling church. He injected pagan religions to the world, and introduced heresy to the church. Everywhere he has gone, he has left corruption, violence, and death in his wake.
He goes by many names: Heylel Bin Shachar, Lucifer, the Devil, the Nail, and Satan. His arsenal includes an innumerable army of demonic beings with their own rank and hierarchy and is an excellent character study of man's fallen nature over these last 6,000 years.
So although regimes come and go, what hasn't changed is man's corrupted nature prone to self-destruction.
The pace of advancements in technology is increasing so rapidly, that most people don't fully understand the awful power it could wield in the hands of the wrong people. The Bible states that a man is coming who will take advantage of the ever-controlling technology and use it to rule the world with an iron fist. Every tyrant who has come before him, will pale by comparison in his ruthlessness and his genius for dominating the world. He is the rider on the white horse, and the world will cheer his arrival.
Restrained
The Holy Spirit is the Restrainer as mentioned in 2 Thess 2:7, and what He restrains isn't evil necessarily around the world, because we've had evil ever present since Adam's fall. What He restrains is two-fold in this present dispensation:
Satan is restrained from indwelling any one person in this dispensation. Aside from the serpent at the Garden of Eden, possibly Antiochus Epiphanes, and Judas Iscariot, all of which occurred prior to Christ's victory on the Cross, no one else is listed as having been personally indwelt by Satan until the Antichrist comes. Judas Iscariot and the Antichrist are the only two who share the same title as a (son of perdition). This is not to say that lesser demon can't possess today, but Satan is a singular being, and he can't be possessing people on earth if he is busy 'accusing us day and night' before the throne of God.
God restrains Himself largely through the ceasing's of 'signs and wonders' that were ever present in the Old Testament times. As the apostles were martyred and died, so too did their supernatural (ex: raising the dead) testimonies. What we have now is the completed word of truth in the scriptures, and the ministry of the Holy Spirit through the believers in the Church.
The Little Horn
"I was considering the horns, and there was another horn, a little one, coming up among them, before whom three of the first horns were plucked out by the roots. And there, in this horn, were eyes like the eyes of a man, and a mouth speaking pompous words." (Daniel 7:8) NKJV
"And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy." (Revelation 13:1)
We have seen through our history past, that out of the Roman Empire's demise, subsequent nations rise up (Dan 7:21-24) in various forms both in the eastern and western legs.
As the west fizzled out, the Holy Roman Empire took form. In the east, the Byzantine ruled until conquered by the Turkish Ottoman Empire took for the next 500 years. In the west, Germania, England, Portugal, Spain, and France each had their day in the sun.
Out of Europe would come the United States, the latest and most powerful nation the world had ever seen. Although I disagree with his conclusion, I think the late Dr. Hank Lindstrom was on to something when he posited that the US could be the Little Horn Daniel 7:
A little horn (as opposed to fully developed horns) denotes newness or youngness.
If the fourth beast represented the Roman Empire (legs of iron), than the ten toes would represent a continuation of that same empire only more fractured and mixed with miry clay. This of course would be the European Union which began in 1948, also the same year that Israel was rebirthed as a nation. Than that little horn would have to be the youngest of those nations, but stronger than all the others.
While the US was birthed from England hundreds of years prior, we didn't become a world power until the end of World War II. Rome existed hundreds of years before it became a world power. What other nation has the terrible power and authority that the US has?
The More You Know...
NSA leaker Eric Snowden revealed to the world at large, to just what depths the US would go to maintain its technological edge by collecting data not just on Americans, but on everyone. The NSA Data Utah center will hold yottabytes of information. A yottabyte, is the equivalent of a trillion terabytes. Why does the NSA need a data center so large when all the digital information in the world is not even to a yottabyte yet?
"Earlier this year the Kingston Company announced a new one terabyte USB thumb drive. In other words, on a flash storage unit smaller than your thumb, they can now fit a terabyte of data. We hear these words so much that they lose their meaning, so let's try to picture it. Plain text data typed on a page can be stored at a rate of 256,000 pages per megabyte. That means a megabyte of text fills a stack of paper 85 feet tall, but a terabyte is a million times larger than a megabyte, that means you could store on one thumb drive the equivalent of a stack of paper more than 16,000 miles high. This is astronomical. The International Space Station orbits about 240 miles above the earth. Our stack of paper would be 67 times higher, all of it stored on a space smaller than your thumb. If modern technology allows us to put that kind of data on such a small space, what can they do with hundreds of thousands of square feet?" -The Hal Lindsey Report (21JUN13)
Now we have an information collection system that dwarfs anything the world has ever seen. Even if we only did track 'metadata', there is still an awful dark side to that. A government could effectively everyone. The government now is using various crises to implement control systems that would become so encompassing, that no one would ever be able to 'go off the grid' again.
The US also has the greatest military this planet has ever seen. Although we've seen her power diminishing under recent administrations, the US is still the envy of all the world in its ability to project its military strength abroad on a moment's notice. Whoever has her arsenal at their disposal, truly could dominate the planet like no other.
Assessment
Although the EU consists of almost thirty nations currently, they are already finding out how economically unmanageable all the nations in various stages of economic turmoil. Dr. Rob Congdon, an expert on Europe, predicts that the EU could be broken down into ten economic regions. I tend to think that along with the EU, the Mediterranean Union will be reformed post-Psalm 83/Isaiah 19/Ezekiel 38-39 scenarios to fit into a truly revamped Roman Empire.
What marks the US as distinctly different from Europe or anywhere else in the world, is that Christians permeate all levels of government and civilian sector professions here. If the Rapture where to occur tomorrow, every facet of our society would suffer tremendously. What is troubling though, is that globally, everything is tied to the US in one way or another. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the United Nations, OPEC, and the Dollar as a reserve currency all are tied directly to the United States.
The greatest export we have is not our computers or our military equipment, it is the US Dollar. Every other currency in the world is tied to its stability. If the dollar were to collapse, it would trigger a global financial collapse unlike anything the world has ever seen. What is mind boggling, is that financially speaking, we KNOW what not to do (massive printing of dollars), but we are doing it anyway (QE4). Why? I no longer believe that our government is simply incompetent or ignorant of its disastrous economic decisions, but are intentionally doing this to wreck the system, so they can remake it based on a new world order.
Although tempting to point to the US as the "Little Horn", we simply do not fit into picture that either Daniel or John paint for us in their writings. That is not to say we can't be the single point supply source for the weapons and technology that the Antichrist will one day exploit during the right crisis. While the world and its leaders may scoff at the idea of a Biblical Rapture, Satan does not. Satan knows it's real, and he is furiously moving his players into place for that sudden and unexpected eventuality. This in turn explains why leaders feel the need today, to build vast facilities capable of storing more data than exists in the world. This explains why our economic system is in such a mess.
In order for there to be a one-world economic system, the current system and its various currencies would need to be replaced by one. Revelation 13 speaks of that man, THE Antichrist, who will control the entire world by utilizing this system. But Satan's man doesn't create it, he just capitalizes on what is already built, using the perfect crisis as justification to hit the reset button to start over in a system that can be centrally controlled. We know that the 'perfect crisis' will be one that effectively hits the US the hardest, since all the other systems are tied into ours. What could be that event that turns the world on its head?
"For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore comfort one another with these words." (1 Thess 4:16-18)
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