Now, tonight, in the Book of Revelation, 6th
chapter, I saw when the Lamb opened one
of the seals, and I heard as it
were the noise of thunder, one of the
four beasts saying, Come and see.
Incidentally, the word come and see, the word
come and see, come is the word, not
come and see, but come, if you will
look at any version.
And I saw and behold a white horse,
and he that sat on him had a
bow, and a crown was given unto him,
and he went forth conquering and to conquer.
And when he had opened the second seal,
I heard the second beast say, Come.
And there went out another horse that was
red, and power was given to him that
sat thereon to take peace from the earth,
and that they should kill one another.
And there was given unto him a great
sword.
And when he had opened the third seal,
I heard the third beast say, Come.
And I beheld and lo, a black horse.
He that sat on him had a pair
of balances in his hand.
And I heard a voice in the midst
of the four beasts say, A measure of
wheat for a penny, and three measures of
barley for a penny, and see thou hurt
not the oil and the wine.
When he had opened the fourth seal, I
heard the voice of the fourth beast say,
Come.
And I looked and behold a pale horse,
and his name that sat on him was
Death, and Hell followed with him.
And power was given unto them over the
fourth part of the earth to kill with
sword, and with hunger, and with death, and
with the beasts of the earth.
Now, there is what the Bible tells us
about the four horsemen that have become so
celebrated and so often mentioned throughout the world.
Let me begin by saying to you that
there is a hope.
We all have it.
Hope springs eternal, said the poet.
There is a hope, and it's a pitiful
vain hope, and yet it's a hope that
I do not blame anybody for having it
all.
It is the hope that the earth will
be yet a good place to live, a
place of peace.
Somehow we'll get everything untangled, and that we'll
find the secret of how to bring peace
to this poor distraught world of ours, to
destroy that cold war and end the controversies
between nations, stop the assassinations and the threats,
and have peace throughout the world.
Do you know what we have done, my
brothers and sisters?
We have elected to office good men, or
at least men of ability, and then we
have given them a commission that they can't
fulfill.
Nobody can.
If you were to raise from the dead
Julius Caesar and Hannibal and George Washington and
Gladstone, and you could just take your pick
among the great men of all nations of
the world and put them in office, they
wouldn't do a very much better job than
is being done now, because we are expecting
of our elected officials the performance of duties
and work which they simply cannot perform.
The only thing I blame them for is
lying about it to get elected.
If they were honest they would say, if
you elect me I'll go to Ottawa or
Washington or wherever it is, and I will
do the best I can, but if the
thing blows up in our face, don't look
at me, because things are worse than you
think they are.
I'd vote for a man like that just
on general principle, at least he would be
honest.
But they are always telling us that if
we elect them, and they have a hope
that it will be so, maybe I'm too
harsh when I say they are lying about
it.
I think maybe that they hypnotize themselves into
thinking that it's true, that if they get
elected that they will bring this world into
a state of peace.
They have certain phrases, one is lasting peace.
There hasn't been a political speech made now
since the close of the Second World War
that hasn't ended with a promise, that if
everybody would do what the Speaker said there
would be lasting peace among men.
Then they also would like, we'd like to
believe that this will be a place of
universal health, that somehow we'll lick this thing
of getting sick.
And we'll just lick it, we'll do it
somehow or other, if we just get enough
money for the Heart Fund and the TB
Fund and the Polio Fund and the Heart
Artery Fund and all the different funds, we'll
finally just lick this whole problem.
And you know my sympathies are with them
and I wish I believed it and I
wish I could believe it.
And then they say the social and economic
problems will be solved and this will be
a social and economic paradise after a while,
just after a while.
And there will be religious unity and there
won't be one church here and one across
the street, but there will be one larger
church and we'll use the other for a
playground for healthy, bright children and save the
overhead.
Well now, all of that sounds good and
I say this is the vain hope, this
is the hope of the dying child who
talks pitifully to its parents about what it'll
do when it gets well and they look
at each other and fight back the tears,
they know it'll not get well and it
doesn't know it and they're not going to
tell it.
And anybody who stands up and says what
I'm saying tonight and I'm going to say,
can't be a popular man, he just cannot
be.
I'd like to be popular for 20 minutes
sometime to see how it feels.
But if you're on the side of the
Lord you can't be popular, you just can't
be for the simple reason that he wasn't
and as he is so are we in
this world.
And if I got popular I suppose I'd
be repenting in sackcloth and ashes, for so
did they do to the false prophets before
us.
But we might as well face up to
some facts, ladies and gentlemen, and we might
as well face them and build them into
our thinking and begin to allow them to
become a part of our total philosophy of
life and religion, that this world will not
get better.
Now it may for a little while get
better.
A great fellow by the name of Sam
Rayburn was lying as you know at the
point of death, and I said to my
wife, well, Mr. Sam is in a coma
and he's probably gone.
But the next day I heard on the
radio that he had rallied and was on
his way back.
Well, I suppose he knew people and could
talk to people again.
Well, he's 80-some years old, or nearly
80, or maybe past 80, or about 80,
and he has cancer throughout his entire body,
and added to that he had pneumonia.
And I naturally thought that would be the
end, but it wasn't the end, and he's
now rallied so he knows people.
But who in his right mind would imagine
an 80-year-old man with cancer throughout
his entire body and pneumonia could last much
longer?
And yet he has periods when he knows
people, feels better and can talk.
So it is with the world.
We might as well face up to it
that the old world has had its mortal
wound and we're not going to get better.
We may for a little while do better.
When I grew up as a lad I
remember there hadn't been a war for a
long time.
There hadn't been a real war since the
Spanish-American War, which wasn't too serious a
war.
And then not until 1914 was there any
war.
There was about 16 years of peace there.
And the patient woke up and knew people
and talked again, and his temperature went down
and his friends said, well, we think maybe
the world is going to get better.
But in 1914 it blew up.
And then after it was finished in 1918,
all the writers and preachers, I regret to
say, and everybody nearly began to say, well,
now we've outlawed war, we can't have war
anymore, there won't be any.
And there wasn't any until 1939.
And then it blew up in our face
again.
And after we had fought our way through
that in blood and tears, the poor old
world, and come out of it, and there
had been two surrenders over there, one in
Europe and one in the Far East, we
said, well, this should be it.
And now you're hearing the same language and
the same reports and the same threats and
the same warnings and the same backings away
and the same people saying, you can't bluff
us, and then being bluffed.
Same thing happening now.
And I recognize it, I can smell that
thing, because I remember two wars, two world
wars, not to mention that police trouble that
Truman said we had in Korea.
And one of my boys limps around on
a cane and will for the rest of
his life, an athletic boy that he was,
but now limping around because of that police
action.
These things are, and the world is not
going to get better, it's just going to
have lucid moments.
It's going to have times when things aren't
as bad as they are at other times.
And that's about all that can be said
about the world, and we might as well
face up to it.
And we might as well face up to
it that regardless of what the teachers say,
from the kindergarten to PhDs, that we're not
going to have a true world brotherhood.
Nobody loves dear old Bobby Burns better than
I do, but when he talks about when
will brothers be for all that and all
that, he's just talking good Scots nonsense, or
good Burns nonsense, because certainly the Scots people
know better.
But there will be no world brotherhood, it
can't be, my brethren, because the scriptures teach
otherwise, and war will not be abolished.
We imagine that war is going to be
abolished.
Now, all this is preliminary to the sermon,
and it will come later, if I hold
out.
But in Jeremiah 26, here's what God says,
verse 25, and I'm sure I have it
here, verse 25 it must be, verse 26,
And therefore thou shalt say unto them, Thus
saith the Lord of hosts, the God of
Israel, Drink ye, and be drunken, and spew,
and fall, and rise no more, because of
the sword that I will send among you.
And it shall be, if they refuse to
take the cup at thine hand to drink,
then thou shalt say, Thus saith the Lord,
ye shall certainly drink.
For lo, I begin to bring evil on
the city which is called by my name,
and shall ye be utterly unpunished, he says
to the nations of the world.
Ye shall not be unpunished, for I will
call for a sword upon all the inhabitants
of the earth, saith the Lord of hosts.
Nor shall they come even to the ends
of the earth, for the Lord hath a
controversy with the nations.
He will plead with all flesh, he will
give them that are wicked to the sword,
saith the Lord.
Thus saith the Lord of hosts, Behold, evil
shall go forth from nation to nation, and
a great whirlwind shall be raised up from
the coasts of the earth, and the slain
of the Lord shall be at that day
from one end of the earth even unto
the other end of the earth.
And they shall not be lamented neither gathered,
saith the Lord.
Matthew 24, our Lord tells us that there
shall be wars, and rumors of wars, and
nations shall rise against nations, and kingdom against
kingdom, till the end comes.
I wish I could speak otherwise.
I'd very much like to speak otherwise.
I'd like to join the company of people
who have eyes and see not, and ears
and hear not.
It would be more comfortable.
But I've chosen a long time ago to
know the truth even if it doesn't make
me comfortable.
And now in this sixth chapter of Revelation,
here I notice the excitement of the heavenly
in the fifth chapter, the excitement of the
heavenly seers, the intense interest, the eager expectation,
the fear and the hope, and the ecstatic
worship.
And the lion who became a lamb stepped
forward and received the book.
And I said last Sunday night that that
book was the title deed to the world,
and that the problem in that fifth chapter
of Revelation is who owns the world?
To whom does the world belong?
And if you know anything about political history,
or economic history, or the history of various
social philosophies, you know that they've had various
opinions.
They're saying now that the world belongs to
the worker.
That's how Russia is getting its great hold
over the masses.
They say the world belongs to the worker.
And Plato said the world belonged to the
thinker, and some say the world belongs to
the geniuses, and so it goes.
The world belongs to this class or to
that class.
But God is revealing now in Revelation 6
who it is the world belongs to.
And it is found that it belongs to
the one who is worthy and can prove
by opening the seals.
And they searched everywhere for somebody that could
take the book and open the seals, which
would be the proof that the world belonged
to that man.
They couldn't find anybody in heaven, earth, or
hell.
They searched everywhere, and at last the Lamb
rose.
The Lamb of the tribe of Judah rose,
and they burst into acclamation and ecstatic worship,
and they said, The Lamb which is in
the midst of the throne, he is worthy.
Now he takes the book, and when he
takes the book, one of the four creatures
says, Come.
Not come and see, but come.
Come and see was spoken to John, but
it's been carried over to the sixth chapter,
but it's come, as you will note if
you know the original.
But the mighty creature in the midst of
the throne, full of eyes and with a
voice like thunder, says, Come.
And to whom is this addressed?
Who is he talking to now?
Not talking to John anymore because John faded
out of the picture.
He's not talking to the Lamb because it's
a come.
I'll tell you the one to whom he
is talking.
They are waiting for horses, and he says,
Come, these four horsemen of the revelation.
The hour had come to them to gallop
forth, and long they had been waiting now,
waiting, waiting.
The scripture says that patience is one of
the fruits of the Spirit, and I have
learned not too long ago that patience means
power to wait.
That's a good definition of patience, power to
wait.
That's something that I have as little of
as any man that I know, power to
wait.
If either I don't want to do it
or I want to do it right now,
to have to wait around has always been
to me a source of terrible embarrassment and
irritation.
But the great God Almighty, who has all
eternity to work in, is able to wait.
You and I, with our creature impatience, we
cry to God, O God, how long, how
long?
And God says, in effect, Why be in
such a hurry?
I've got eternity, and you have eternity in
your heart, and you've got eternity, so why
get all excited and overheated about this?
God is waiting.
These four horses are chomping the bit, and
the four horsemen are waiting to ride forth,
but they've had to wait, and they've had
to wait a long time.
And because they've waited a long time, generation
after generation of Christians has risen and has
believed that the Lord was going to come
right now.
And then he didn't come, and they were
discouraged, and some turned away from this faith
and said, Well, he didn't come, and he
won't come.
Peter said they'd be like that.
He said there'd be those saying, Where's the
promise?
What's happened to the promise of his coming?
Well, they don't have the power to wait.
But God has the power to wait, and
so he's waited a long time.
Who are these horsemen?
Let's just notice them briefly here.
The white horse rides out, and among the
Bible teachers that I know, there are two
opposing views, strangely enough, who this white horse
is and who sits upon this white horse.
Some say it's Christ, but I can't possibly
see how that can be in this context.
The white horse carries antichrist, not Christ, conquering
by duplicity.
I tell you, I wish that there was
somewhere where you could go and say, Now,
here, everything is safe.
If I take this position, there will be
no trouble from here on.
Nobody will bother me, I'll just wait around
until the consummation of all things.
But let me tell you that whatever position
you take about anything anywhere, the Devil isn't
going to let you alone.
We talk about unity and brotherhood and peace,
and now you can do one of two
things about it.
You can turn away from it, or you
can accept it, or you can do a
third thing.
You can say, As much as I should
like to see unity among all nations, and
as much as I should like to see
brotherhood among nations, and as much as I
should like to see a lasting, just peace
on the earth, as much as I should
like to see one religion in which all
men fall down to worship Jesus, as much
as I should like to see mutual security
and tolerance in one world, I cannot accept
it and do not believe in it.
So instead of being sour, you are to
turn the other way and not be sour
about it, but not accept.
You see, the Antichrist and all of his
forces, when they want to put something across,
they say, Oh, but you've got to love
everybody.
Mustn't you love everybody?
And while you're busy loving everybody, they steal
your back teeth.
While you're busy loving everybody, they take over
and run the world.
That's one of the commonest, cheapest little tricks.
I can tell the sound of it no
matter where I hear it.
When they say, Coexistence, coexistence, look out brother,
they're putting you to sleep so they can
take over something.
Coexistence, and when the liberals and the unbelievers
and the what have you say, unity, brotherhood
and love, the man of love came to
the world at Christmas time amid jingled bells
and jolliness.
And the man of love, they say, let's
all love everybody.
And while you're busy loving them, they're busy
teaching your kids in college that Moses didn't
write the Pentateuch, God didn't create the heaven
and the earth, there was no Adam and
there was no Eve, there was no fall
of man, that Moses didn't lead Israel across
the Red Sea, that the story of Jonah
is the myth that the whale never swallowed
him, that Christ did not rise from the
dead, that he was not born of a
Virgin Mary, but the son of a German
soldier and a woman who wasn't any better
than she should have been.
You say this sounds blasphemous.
It's blasphemous, all right, but it's taught by
men from the pulpit in the name of
love everybody and greet each other with a
holy kiss.
Well, I don't want to hurt anybody, and
I want to be nice, as nice as
I can be, but I'm not going to
be taken in.
As soon as you start getting taken in,
you're opening yourself for that vicious, evil one
to be called Antichrist.
Strange, isn't it?
Nobody talks about the Antichrist anymore except worldly
men.
Preachers don't talk about him because they talked
about him a lot and knew so much
about him, and then he kind of let
them down.
Men didn't come when they thought they would,
and now we're ashamed to talk about him
at all.
Well, I'm not.
I believe the Antichrist is coming.
I think he's coming to the world.
I don't know when he's coming or how
he's coming, but when I hear Father John
over there saying that he wants to open
his arms and that all of us should
return to the true church, I'm hearing the
voice.
I don't say he's Antichrist, but I say
that he's a front-runner and that if
we listen to him, it will be Antichrist
before long.
So let's thank God for every bit of
unity there is and all the brotherhood there
is, but the Antichrist will rule by duplicity,
and he'll use every technique possible.
Did you ever stop to think that we
are now in a position to make everybody
think exactly like everybody else?
And they do.
A woman gets a certain haircut, and Dorothy
Calgillan writes about it in her column, and
every other woman on the continent has it,
whether she'd become one or not.
One woman gets a hat that looks like
a flower pot on its way out, and
every other woman gets one, too, because it's
radio, newspapers, magazines, television and all the rest.
So we are in a position now to
change everybody overnight into what we want them
to be by psychological conditioning, by advertising and
slick publicity buildup.
That's the Antichrist's technique he's going to use.
He's going to promise economic prosperity and perhaps
get it for a while.
There never has been a dictator come to
the world yet that didn't make the railroad
run on time, if there were any railroads,
and that didn't put a dollar or two
in the pocket of the people that he's
leading, and one finally going to put in
change.
I got a funny letter the other day.
I answered it today, that is, I talked
on to a little affair, and the letter
will go out tomorrow, maybe.
But anyway, this fellow wrote me, he said,
Dear Brother, now please remember that I want
to be respectful and that this is no
intention of opposing you in any way.
I don't know who he thought I was,
but he wanted to reassure me in a
whole page that he loved the very sight
of me and that I was nice and
that he wasn't opposing me.
But he said, How could you write what
you wrote about Franklin D.
Roosevelt when you said what you said about
him?
Don't you think that you ought to open
your magazine for equal space for somebody else?
Well, the answer is, of course, no.
All I said about Franklin D.
Roosevelt was he was not a common man.
I said he was an uncommon man.
And of course he was an uncommon man.
Any Joe down the street here couldn't have
done what he did.
He was a common man, an uncommon man,
and he knew how to lead the common
man.
And I said, wouldn't I, in my answer,
wouldn't it be too bad if I, in
my God-given message, got over on to
the side of one political party or another?
I wouldn't go over on to one political
party or another.
But I would say, when I see a
man that can elevate his cigarette a forty
-five degrees angle and lean back and say,
My friend, and conquer, so to speak, at
least a part of the little part of
the world and keep eating out of his
hand for twelve years, he wasn't a common
man.
And I don't care whether he was a
Democrat or a Republican or a Stradler, he
wasn't a common man.
So I suppose somebody will say that this
is political.
There is nothing political about it, ladies and
gentlemen.
I'm just telling you there is one coming.
God Almighty has told us he would come,
and he has been prophesied all through the
scriptures.
And he is going to head up the
religious and political forces, and he is going
to be diametrically opposed to the Lord Jesus
Christ.
You say, Is it Khrushchev?
The answer is a positive, a resounding no,
because Khrushchev is an atheist and this man
is going to be religious.
I don't know who it is.
Don't force me and hunt me up afterwards
and say, Now tell me who is it?
I don't know who it is.
If I knew who it was, I would
be wiser than I am now.
But it could easily be that he has
been born somewhere in the world and is
now living and will come to prominence in
that time.
And when he comes, he will come with
duplicity, I say, and he will preach unity
and brotherhood and peace and ecumenicity and one
religion and mutual security, and he will preach
alas and just in peace.
And the Cold War will end and every
man will be every other man's brother, but
he will keep his gun on his hip
anyhow.
That's the Antichrist.
So he rides forth and he brings the
world under his control.
Wouldn't you like to have me stand here
and tell you the day would soon be
when the world would be a beautiful, safe
place in which to live and we could
look forward to our children and grandchildren and
great-grandchildren occupying the beautiful world without sickness,
without war, without religious differences?
If I told you that, I would be
telling you a lie and I must face
my judge sometime, and I am not going
to lie about it.
But there is going to be one who
will come and tell them that, and he
will be a very wonderful fellow and he
will make them listen.
Then following him comes the Red Horse, and
I heard another creature say, Come, and there
went forth a Red Horse, and he carried
war on his back.
But you say, how could it be following
hard on peace and prosperity and brotherhood and
unity and one religion and security and tolerance
and all the rest?
How could there be war?
Because Antichrist is not able to keep men
from warring, he doesn't want to do it,
so following hard on peace.
When Mussolini came to power, you know what
he did.
He brought poor old Italy out of her
tailspin economically and everybody had money in his
pocket, and then he started his war.
Hitler came to power and the same thing
happened, and so it goes and always has
been, that you can only have prosperity by
war and you can never have it any
other way.
This man who wrote me about Mr. F.
D.
R.
said that it was he that got us
out of the Depression.
Well, I wonder if this good man, God
bless him, I was very nice to him
in writing to him, because I don't want
to have any controversy, particularly with any nice
man like that who likes me.
But I mentioned to him, I didn't mention
to him, but could have, that the way
we got out of the Depression was when
war came, and always it will be so.
And dear ladies and gentlemen, hear me say
this now and make what you can out
of it, that if tomorrow morning at nine
o'clock there was an authentic and valid
proclamation to go out from every capital city
of the world, from Ottawa, from Washington, from
Berlin, from Moscow, from every capital city of
the world, an authentic and valid proclamation, that
all wars were ended and all soldiers were
being called home and all military power was
over and we were going to disarm and
not be able ever again to wage war,
do you know what would follow it?
One of the worst depressions in the history
of the world would follow it.
The world is living on a war basis,
and it is the billions we're spending around
the world now for war and for to
keep our soldiers and sailors and airmen going
that gives us the economic prosperity that we
have now.
And the Antichrist will find that out.
He'll find that you've got to fight in
order to be prosperous.
Now, I don't believe in it, understand, but
I'm just telling you what's here and telling
you what history shows, and it's a simple
fact, that if we were to call home
suddenly all of the soldiers and sailors and
marines and airmen and wax and waves and
winds and everything, where would their jobs be
falling?
You know better.
You know that prosperity that we're riding on
now with all of this money we've got?
War money and war prosperity.
And if war ends and we disarm, what
do we do with our men?
I wish we might, and I'd take a
chance on it by the grace of God,
and I'd say somehow or other we could
level her down, and I'd rather be hungry
than to have a boy killed in battle.
I'd rather live in a humble house than
have a big house than have it smashed
with a bone.
But it doesn't look as if you could
take your choice.
Following immediately upon the red horse, which is
war, comes a black horse, which is famine.
And everybody knows how famine follows war.
There's a dislocation of things, there are burnt
-over areas, there are long seasons in which
the men who would farm aren't farming, the
men who would raise the cattle aren't raising
them, and the people who would produce food
can't produce it, and the factories are shut
down or running at the poor lame pace.
And pretty soon the great dislocated masses throughout
the world begin to starve, and we have
famine.
That's the black horse.
And the fourth one is that pale horse
which is called death.
And the horrible part is that hell rides
along behind pestilence, pestilence, and causes bacteriological warfare
and natural warfare, along with pestilence and famine.
My dear friends, these things are out there,
and you might as well face up to
them.
Now, some of you wish you'd stayed at
home, because you wanted me to say something
very encouraging, and I don't know how I'm
going to say something encouraging when I don't
see anything in the Bible to encourage us
in our present godless way of living.
I don't see any reason for why, or
any valid reason for our saying, Cheer up,
we're all going to be well, and all
will be well for all that and all
that.
All will not be well while I hear
the chomping of the bits of those horses,
and I see upon their backs those symbolic
creatures riding out.
You say they'll never ride over Canada.
Yes, they will, and over the United States,
and over England, and over Europe, and over
Asia.
They will ride, all right.
Today the world holds its breath, and the
chance of the statesman is a just and
lasting peace and prosperity and preservation of nations
and all the rest.
No sane man wants it otherwise.
No sane man wants war.
God knows that men want the things that
create war.
Nobody wants to go to hell, but we
want to live in a way that will
send us to hell finally.
Nobody wants to go to jail, but men
want to do things that finally put them
in jail.
And so there isn't a nation in the
world, not a nation in the world, including
Russia, that wants war.
Not one.
No nation wants war, but they want things
that lead to war.
There is our problem.
No Castro wants war.
No Khrushchev wants war.
Certainly no Kennedy wants war.
No Diesenbaker wants war.
No Adenauer wants war.
They don't want war, but certain evil men
want things that lead to war.
War there will be, and the four horsemen
are waiting.
If you pray and read your Bible with
reverence, you will hear the stamping of their
hoofs as they wait to ride out in
the history, and the world doesn't know it.
And that's why I never can hear a
political speech without cringing.
Never.
Never can hear a political speech without cringing,
because I know there are honest men making
those speeches.
I know there are good, well-intentioned men
who are making those speeches, and I have
no doubt, and I am naive enough to
believe, that there are men today who would
give their lives if they could.
The Diesenbakers and the Kennedys and the Adenauers
and the rest of them, if they came
to a flat showdown, would give their lives
if they could save their children and their
children's children from the horrors and hell that
will be war.
But they can't, and they don't know how.
The book of God has told us that
there will ride out over the nations of
the world these four creatures.
And they wait, and men violate the holy
laws of God.
I wish that somebody who is in a
position to do it, I wish that somebody
in a position to do it, would write
a book or give a series of talks
on this subject.
I am not in a position to do
it.
I wish I could.
I've thought about it, and I've wondered if
maybe I shouldn't write something about it and
lean into the wind and take the abuse
it would bring.
But I wonder whether there's any justification, say,
for air travel.
I wonder if there's any justification for birth
control.
I wonder if there's any justification for test
tubes.
I wonder if there's any justification for the
atom or our use of the atom.
I wonder if we can justify this thing
that we're doing, these things that we're doing
in the name of progress.
We've entered into the very holy place where
life begins.
And there, with our instruments and our stethoscopes
and our microscopes, we have entered the holy
place.
And we pry into the secrets of God.
When over there under the grandstand where I've
passed many times in the city of Chicago,
Illinois, down in the midway where the great
sprawling buildings of Chicago University lie, when certain
brilliant men played with the secrets of God
and discovered how you could release the energy
that lay hidden in an atom, when they
did it and rejoiced that they'd succeeded, they
loosed the power in the world that could
destroy the world.
For the first time in the history of
the world, they released the very central secret
of matter.
I wonder if there's any justification for it.
I doubt it.
But what can you do about it now?
It's out of the bottle and it's getting
bigger all the time.
Scientists don't know what they've done.
Politicians don't know what they're doing.
And the common people don't know what the
science and politicians have done.
And so the common people settle it by
seeking pleasure and living for themselves.
What somebody called pampered opulence, that's a good
description of everybody except a small minority in
Canada.
Pampered opulence.
We've got so much we don't know what
to do with it.
And we throw out enough in our garbage
every week to keep thousands of families in
other parts of the world.
Pampered opulence.
Comfort and fun and entertainment.
While the world is falling apart, we're spending
billions on fun.
Back in the book of Amos, I'm nearly
finished.
Back in the book of Amos, there's a
passage that always makes me, bothers me.
Woe to them that are these in Zion.
Ye that put far away the evil day
and cause the seed of violence to come
nearer.
That lie upon beds of ivory.
Stretch themselves upon their couches and eat the
lambs out of the flock and the calves
out of the stall.
Chant to the sound of the vial and
invent to themselves instruments of music.
Drink wine in bowls and anoint themselves with
the chief ointment.
But they are not grieved for the affliction
of Joseph.
There follows God's word, what he will do.
I abhor the excellency of Jacob and hate
his palaces.
Therefore will I deliver up the city with
all that is therein.
It shall come to pass if there remain
ten men in one house, that they shall
die.
Dear brothers and sisters, this is no time
for us who have our eyes open.
Whether you agree with every detail of this
talk tonight doesn't mean that much.
You have got to agree with the main
point.
Whether you agree with all of it doesn't
matter, but that you do agree.
God Almighty has said nations should rise against
nations, there should be wars everywhere throughout the
world, and evil men should get worse and
worse until the end, and love should wax
cold, and the Church should backslide and become
careless.
That you can't deny, and there isn't any
other interpretation for that.
Here it is, nobody can deny it.
Details and symbols we may have different opinions
on, but the main truth is here and
you can't get around it.
Into history, into the world soon, there will
ride forth the white horse, the black horse,
the red horse, the pale horse, and the
seal will open, and they'll know in heaven
and earth and hell that this world belongs
not to men, but to Jesus Christ, the
man who with his blood purchased the earth
back to himself.
In the meantime, men are doing the best
they can, and we ought to pray every
day, brothers.
We Christians ought to pray for those in
authority.
Whether you are of the same political party
as your Prime Minister, I don't know nor
care.
You ought to pray for him every day.
I'm not of the same political persuasion as
Jack Kennedy, but I must pray for him,
I must pray for him.
And I must pray for every man, every
Premier, every Governor, every President, every man in
authority throughout the whole world.
We're sorry that things are in the mess
they're in, and they're doing the best they
can.
So it's not for us to criticize and
condemn and hurl evil words against them.
It's only for us to say that they're
holding positions they're not big enough for, and
nobody is, for the forces of history are
piling up like a rock slide and sweeping
down upon the human race.
The race will not be exterminated, thank God,
it will not be exterminated.
But if you imagine that you can continue
to live at peace and pampered opulence, and
without even remembering to pray for the poor
dying world, then I can't see how you
can be ready for the hour when our
Lord shall call his people home.
I think we ought to spend time in
prayer, waiting before God, seeking him.
I think we ought to drop off some
things that we're doing that are perfectly normal
and all right and not harmful, but they're
keeping us from prayer.
We ought to drop them off in order
that we might spend more time going down
before our God and asking.
Somebody says, should we pray for Russia?
And the answer is, by all means, pray
for Russia.
Not for the success of their evil plans,
but for the millions of poor, sinful people
who are being led with a ring in
their nose and don't know where they're being
led.
Millions of them, I say.
Millions of them still left to have in
their hearts secretly belief in God, the Father
Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.
They haven't succeeded in stamping belief in God
out over there yet.
Pray for China.
Not for the success of their evil plans,
I repeat, but that they might turn to
God and repent.
And pray for Israel, that key nation of
the world, that she might see her Messiah
and be converted to God.
And if we're fooling and playing and stretching
on beds of ivory and spending our time
wasting money, it's too bad in that awful
hour.
I pray that God will help us, ladies
and gentlemen and dear friends and brothers and
sisters.
I pray that God will help us that
we don't get caught here.
I pray that you might be worthy to
escape these things and to stand before the
Son of Man.
I, for myself, want to be a more
serious-minded Christian man than I've ever been
in my whole life.
I, for my part, want to be more
detached from this world than ever I've been
in my life.
And I, for my part, want to be
more ready for heaven than I've ever been
in my life.
And I want an ear that is sharp
to know the voice of the Enemy, whether
it comes from religion or politics or philosophy.
I want to know when I'm hearing the
soft, soothing voice of Antichrist, preparing me psychologically
for a takeover.
I want to know it.
And I would rather stand and have everybody
my enemy than to go along with a
crowd to destruction.
Do you feel that way about it?
Amen.
Now we're going to close, and I want
to pray, or have the pastor pray before
we do.