| FEATURE ARTICLE |
| IS THE EARTH VOMITING OUT ITS INHABITANTS? |
| Commentary by Matt Ravenhouk on an Associated Press article |
"Moreover thou shalt not lie carnally with thy neighbour's wife, to defile thyself with her.
And thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Molech, neither shalt thou profane the name of thy God: I am the
LORD.
Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.
Neither shalt thou lie with any beast to defile thyself therewith: neither shall any woman stand before a beast to lie down
thereto: it is confusion.
Defile not ye yourselves in any of these things: for in all these the nations are defiled which I cast out before you:
And the land is defiled: therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants." (Leviticus
18:20-25)
The Associated Press recently published an article in which they questioned why Planet Earth seems to be spinning out of control. Their
ignorance of the Word of God would lead them to such a preposterous supposition, but the truth of the matter is that the earth is not out of
control, but is in fact obeying the commandment of God. Here is what the article states:
"Is everything spinning out of control? Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home
values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage in Iraq, Afghanistan and
against terrorism."
The can-do, bootstrap approach embedded in the American psyche is under assault. Eroding it is a dour powerlessness that is
chipping away at the country's sturdy conviction that destiny can be commanded with sheer courage and perseverance.
The sense of helplessness is even reflected in this year's presidential election. Each contender offers a sense of order — and hope.
Republican John McCain promises an experienced hand in a frightening time. Democrat Barack Obama promises bright and shiny
change, and his large crowds believe his exhortation, "Yes, we can."
Even so, a battered public seems discouraged by the onslaught of dispiriting things. An Associated Press-Ipsos poll says a barrel-
scraping 17 percent of people surveyed believe the country is moving in the right direction. That is the lowest reading since the survey
began in 2003.
An ABC News-Washington Post survey put that figure at 14 percent, tying the low in more than three decades of taking soundings on
the national mood.
"It is pretty scary," said Charles Truxal, 64, a retired corporate manager in Rochester, Minn. "People are thinking things are going to
get better, and they haven't been. And then you go hide in your basement because tornadoes are coming through. If you think about
things, you have very little power to make it change."
Recent natural disasters around the world dwarf anything afflicting the U.S. Consider that more than 69,000 people died in the China
earthquake, and that 78,000 were killed and 56,000 missing from the Myanmar cyclone.
Americans need do no more than check the weather, look in their wallets or turn on the news for their daily reality check on a world
gone haywire.
Floods engulf Midwestern river towns. Is it global warming, the gradual degradation of a planet's weather that man seems powerless
to stop or just a freakish late-spring deluge?
It hardly matters to those in the path. Just ask the people of New Orleans who survived Hurricane Katrina. They are living in a city
where, 1,000 days after the storm, entire neighborhoods remain abandoned, a national embarrassment that evokes disbelief from
visitors.
Food is becoming scarcer and more expensive on a worldwide scale, due to increased consumption in growing countries such as
China and India and rising fuel costs. That can-do solution to energy needs — turning corn into fuel — is sapping fields of plenty once
devoted to crops that people need to eat. Shortages have sparked riots. In the U.S., rice prices tripled and some stores rationed the
staple.
Residents of the nation's capital and its suburbs repeatedly lose power for extended periods as mere thunderstorms rumble through.
In California, leaders warn people to use less water in the unrelenting drought.
Want to get away from it all? The weak U.S. dollar makes travel abroad forbiddingly expensive. To add insult to injury, some airlines
now charge to check luggage.
Want to escape on the couch? A writers' strike halted favorite TV shows for half a season. The newspaper on the table may soon be a
relic of the Internet age. Just as video stores are falling by the wayside as people get their movies online or in the mail.
But there's always sports, right?
The moorings seem to be coming loose here, too.
Baseball stars Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens stand accused of enhancing their heroics with drugs. Basketball referees are
suspected of cheating.
Stay tuned for less than pristine tales from the drug-addled Tour de France and who knows what from the Summer Olympics.
It's not the first time Americans have felt a loss of control.
Horatio Alger, the dime-novel author whose heroes overcame adversity to gain riches and fame, played to similar anxieties when the
U.S. was becoming an industrial society in the late 1800s.
American University historian Allan J. Lichtman notes that the U.S. has endured comparable periods and worse, including the
economic stagflation (stagnant growth combined with inflation) and Iran hostage crisis of 1980; the dawn of the Cold War, the Korean
War and the hysterical hunts for domestic Communists in the late 1940s and early 1950s; and the Depression of the 1930s.
"All those periods were followed by much more optimistic periods in which the American people had their confidence restored," he
said. "Of course, that doesn't mean it will happen again."
Each period also was followed by a change in the party controlling the White House.
This conclusion on the part of Allan Lichtman is incredibly short sighted, and fails to recognize what really happened after every one of
those periods of high anxiety in American and World society. God used every one of those periods of distress noted above to chasten us
for our sins, and lead us to repentance, but it didn't happen. Yes, each period was followed by a change in the party controlling the White
House, but that was merely an American exercise in futility.
The reason that each period of distress was followed by an increase in intensity by the next, is that Society as a whole --- and American
Society in particular --- did not repent of her sins and ask God for forgiveness. That is the reason that the world is suffering the most intense
and destructive disasters today, than in all previous periods in history. It's going to get even worse, because the inhabitants of Planet Earth
still refuse to repent. They curse God, and accuse him of folly.
"And the rest of the men which were not killed by these plagues yet repented not of the works of their hands, that they should
not worship devils, and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and of wood: which neither can see, nor hear, nor walk:
"Neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts." (Revelation 9:20-21)
Americans are amazed that record rain and snowstorms cause massive flooding, and that tornadoes of magnitudes never before
recorded cause death, homelessness, devastation of farmlands and livestock, while the West Coast suffers the cruelest of droughts, with
rampant wildfires that destroy millions of acres of some of the most beautiful forests in the world.
"And I heard another out of the altar say, Even so, Lord God Almighty, true and righteous are thy judgments.
And the fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun; and power was given unto him to scorch men with fire.
And men were scorched with great heat, and blasphemed the name of God, which hath power over these plagues: and they
repented not to give him glory.
And the fifth angel poured out his vial upon the seat of the beast; and his kingdom was full of darkness; and they gnawed their
tongues for pain,
And blasphemed the God of heaven because of their pains and their sores, and repented not of their deeds." (Revelation 16:7-
11)
All of the abominations listed in Leviticus, chapter 18, are practiced in modern day society, and it only gets worse with each generation.
After World War I, America saw an unprecedented increase in violent crime during the "Roaring Twenties" where drunkenness was
rampant, and machine guns cut down people in the midst of the streets of our cities. This increase in drunkenness happened when the sale
of liquor and beer was outlawed! That period was also when our women abandoned godliness and became sluts and whores, openly
parading their sin before the face of God. Violence, drunkenness, immorality, and hedonism marked the 1920s. So God chastened
America, and the whole world with the severe economic depression of the 1930s. The stock market collapsed, the commodity markets
crashed, the rich farmland of the Midwest dried up and turned to powder, and was blown away by the wind.
In the cities, millions of working men were reduced to begging a crust of bread, and their families went hungry as if they were living in
Haiti, or Somalia. Many men became hobos, and rode the rails in hopes of finding a better life, which never materialized. Men who were
once successful farmers had to work for pennies picking the crops of other farmers in California and Oregon. They lived in abandoned cars
and trucks, and in shanties made from orange crates, in the deserts and garbage dumps of the Southwest. This writer actually saw those
shanty towns in the Mojave Desert, near Barstow, California. They were still flourishing as late as 1956! But the Great Depression was world
wide, not just a local event.
But did Society repent, and turn to her God? The answer is no. Instead of repenting of her sins, Society turned to Hollywood, and sought
comfort from her distress by occupying herself with insipid and stupid movies and burlesque shows. Whoremongers and drug addicts such
as Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland became objects of worship. Shirley Temple and Jackie Coogan drew adults into the world of children's
fantasies: Busby Berkley and Flo Ziegfeld reigned as kings.
The result of humanity's stubbornness was the rise of Fascism and Communism in Germany, Italy, Japan, and Russia, coupled with the
election of a wicked man to the American Presidency, which in turn plunged the entire earth into a conflagration which toppled governments,
destroyed entire cities, and claimed literally hundreds of millions of human lives. But Society still refused to repent.
The world returned to the pursuit of materialism, hedonism, and gross immorality as if nothing had happened. God visited man with a
period of continual high anxiety in the form of the Cold War. People built bomb shelters in their yards, and no one knew if their city or town
would even be around the next day, but could be vaporized by thermonuclear bombs in a matter of minutes.
God visited mankind with a series of unwinnable wars, such as Korea and Viet nam, where tens of thousands of soldiers and millions of
civilians died, But instead of repenting, society simply sunk deeper into depravity. The sexual revolution of the sixties and the rise of the
Hippy movement marked the acceptance of sexual promiscuity and the recreational use of narcotics into the mainstream of modern culture.
"But evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived." (2 Timothy 3:13)
The hippies and perverts of the sixties graduated from college, and went on to become politicians. Society replaced the renunciation of
money during the sixties, with the intense materialism and hedonism of the seventies and eighties. Insipid jerks like John Travolta paraded
as peacocks dressed in white suits, and the restraints were removed from Hollywood film makers. Now they could not only show nudity, but
could use the filthiest of language with impunity. That filthy conversation of the wicked, which so vexed Lot in the days of Sodom, carried
over into prime-time television and commercial radio broadcasting. It is now not unusual by any means to hear little children use the F-word,
and call each other bitches and "hos" during prime-time sitcoms. Commercial radio stations broadcast an endless profusion of excrement
under the guise of "Rap and Hip-Hop music" which regularly use words that would have gotten them thrown under the jail just a decade ago.
Instead of repentance, Society has dug in its heels, and cursed the God of Creation to his face, by legalizing the Abomination of
Desolation, which is homosexuality and lesbianism. Is it any wonder then, that God's creation is reacting to this gross defilement in a violent
manner? The earth is not spinning out of control, but is under the perfect control of God the Creator. All of creation is groaning and travailing,
just waiting for the Sons of God to be revealed.
"For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God.
For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope,
Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.
For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.
And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting
for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body." (Romans 8:19-23)
The earth is not spinning out of control, but is doing exactly what God has ordained that it should do when it becomes polluted and
defiled by unchecked wickedness: It is vomiting out its inhabitants.
And thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Molech, neither shalt thou profane the name of thy God: I am the
LORD.
Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.
Neither shalt thou lie with any beast to defile thyself therewith: neither shall any woman stand before a beast to lie down
thereto: it is confusion.
Defile not ye yourselves in any of these things: for in all these the nations are defiled which I cast out before you:
And the land is defiled: therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants." (Leviticus
18:20-25)
The Associated Press recently published an article in which they questioned why Planet Earth seems to be spinning out of control. Their
ignorance of the Word of God would lead them to such a preposterous supposition, but the truth of the matter is that the earth is not out of
control, but is in fact obeying the commandment of God. Here is what the article states:
"Is everything spinning out of control? Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home
values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage in Iraq, Afghanistan and
against terrorism."
The can-do, bootstrap approach embedded in the American psyche is under assault. Eroding it is a dour powerlessness that is
chipping away at the country's sturdy conviction that destiny can be commanded with sheer courage and perseverance.
The sense of helplessness is even reflected in this year's presidential election. Each contender offers a sense of order — and hope.
Republican John McCain promises an experienced hand in a frightening time. Democrat Barack Obama promises bright and shiny
change, and his large crowds believe his exhortation, "Yes, we can."
Even so, a battered public seems discouraged by the onslaught of dispiriting things. An Associated Press-Ipsos poll says a barrel-
scraping 17 percent of people surveyed believe the country is moving in the right direction. That is the lowest reading since the survey
began in 2003.
An ABC News-Washington Post survey put that figure at 14 percent, tying the low in more than three decades of taking soundings on
the national mood.
"It is pretty scary," said Charles Truxal, 64, a retired corporate manager in Rochester, Minn. "People are thinking things are going to
get better, and they haven't been. And then you go hide in your basement because tornadoes are coming through. If you think about
things, you have very little power to make it change."
Recent natural disasters around the world dwarf anything afflicting the U.S. Consider that more than 69,000 people died in the China
earthquake, and that 78,000 were killed and 56,000 missing from the Myanmar cyclone.
Americans need do no more than check the weather, look in their wallets or turn on the news for their daily reality check on a world
gone haywire.
Floods engulf Midwestern river towns. Is it global warming, the gradual degradation of a planet's weather that man seems powerless
to stop or just a freakish late-spring deluge?
It hardly matters to those in the path. Just ask the people of New Orleans who survived Hurricane Katrina. They are living in a city
where, 1,000 days after the storm, entire neighborhoods remain abandoned, a national embarrassment that evokes disbelief from
visitors.
Food is becoming scarcer and more expensive on a worldwide scale, due to increased consumption in growing countries such as
China and India and rising fuel costs. That can-do solution to energy needs — turning corn into fuel — is sapping fields of plenty once
devoted to crops that people need to eat. Shortages have sparked riots. In the U.S., rice prices tripled and some stores rationed the
staple.
Residents of the nation's capital and its suburbs repeatedly lose power for extended periods as mere thunderstorms rumble through.
In California, leaders warn people to use less water in the unrelenting drought.
Want to get away from it all? The weak U.S. dollar makes travel abroad forbiddingly expensive. To add insult to injury, some airlines
now charge to check luggage.
Want to escape on the couch? A writers' strike halted favorite TV shows for half a season. The newspaper on the table may soon be a
relic of the Internet age. Just as video stores are falling by the wayside as people get their movies online or in the mail.
But there's always sports, right?
The moorings seem to be coming loose here, too.
Baseball stars Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens stand accused of enhancing their heroics with drugs. Basketball referees are
suspected of cheating.
Stay tuned for less than pristine tales from the drug-addled Tour de France and who knows what from the Summer Olympics.
It's not the first time Americans have felt a loss of control.
Horatio Alger, the dime-novel author whose heroes overcame adversity to gain riches and fame, played to similar anxieties when the
U.S. was becoming an industrial society in the late 1800s.
American University historian Allan J. Lichtman notes that the U.S. has endured comparable periods and worse, including the
economic stagflation (stagnant growth combined with inflation) and Iran hostage crisis of 1980; the dawn of the Cold War, the Korean
War and the hysterical hunts for domestic Communists in the late 1940s and early 1950s; and the Depression of the 1930s.
"All those periods were followed by much more optimistic periods in which the American people had their confidence restored," he
said. "Of course, that doesn't mean it will happen again."
Each period also was followed by a change in the party controlling the White House.
This conclusion on the part of Allan Lichtman is incredibly short sighted, and fails to recognize what really happened after every one of
those periods of high anxiety in American and World society. God used every one of those periods of distress noted above to chasten us
for our sins, and lead us to repentance, but it didn't happen. Yes, each period was followed by a change in the party controlling the White
House, but that was merely an American exercise in futility.
The reason that each period of distress was followed by an increase in intensity by the next, is that Society as a whole --- and American
Society in particular --- did not repent of her sins and ask God for forgiveness. That is the reason that the world is suffering the most intense
and destructive disasters today, than in all previous periods in history. It's going to get even worse, because the inhabitants of Planet Earth
still refuse to repent. They curse God, and accuse him of folly.
"And the rest of the men which were not killed by these plagues yet repented not of the works of their hands, that they should
not worship devils, and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and of wood: which neither can see, nor hear, nor walk:
"Neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts." (Revelation 9:20-21)
Americans are amazed that record rain and snowstorms cause massive flooding, and that tornadoes of magnitudes never before
recorded cause death, homelessness, devastation of farmlands and livestock, while the West Coast suffers the cruelest of droughts, with
rampant wildfires that destroy millions of acres of some of the most beautiful forests in the world.
"And I heard another out of the altar say, Even so, Lord God Almighty, true and righteous are thy judgments.
And the fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun; and power was given unto him to scorch men with fire.
And men were scorched with great heat, and blasphemed the name of God, which hath power over these plagues: and they
repented not to give him glory.
And the fifth angel poured out his vial upon the seat of the beast; and his kingdom was full of darkness; and they gnawed their
tongues for pain,
And blasphemed the God of heaven because of their pains and their sores, and repented not of their deeds." (Revelation 16:7-
11)
All of the abominations listed in Leviticus, chapter 18, are practiced in modern day society, and it only gets worse with each generation.
After World War I, America saw an unprecedented increase in violent crime during the "Roaring Twenties" where drunkenness was
rampant, and machine guns cut down people in the midst of the streets of our cities. This increase in drunkenness happened when the sale
of liquor and beer was outlawed! That period was also when our women abandoned godliness and became sluts and whores, openly
parading their sin before the face of God. Violence, drunkenness, immorality, and hedonism marked the 1920s. So God chastened
America, and the whole world with the severe economic depression of the 1930s. The stock market collapsed, the commodity markets
crashed, the rich farmland of the Midwest dried up and turned to powder, and was blown away by the wind.
In the cities, millions of working men were reduced to begging a crust of bread, and their families went hungry as if they were living in
Haiti, or Somalia. Many men became hobos, and rode the rails in hopes of finding a better life, which never materialized. Men who were
once successful farmers had to work for pennies picking the crops of other farmers in California and Oregon. They lived in abandoned cars
and trucks, and in shanties made from orange crates, in the deserts and garbage dumps of the Southwest. This writer actually saw those
shanty towns in the Mojave Desert, near Barstow, California. They were still flourishing as late as 1956! But the Great Depression was world
wide, not just a local event.
But did Society repent, and turn to her God? The answer is no. Instead of repenting of her sins, Society turned to Hollywood, and sought
comfort from her distress by occupying herself with insipid and stupid movies and burlesque shows. Whoremongers and drug addicts such
as Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland became objects of worship. Shirley Temple and Jackie Coogan drew adults into the world of children's
fantasies: Busby Berkley and Flo Ziegfeld reigned as kings.
The result of humanity's stubbornness was the rise of Fascism and Communism in Germany, Italy, Japan, and Russia, coupled with the
election of a wicked man to the American Presidency, which in turn plunged the entire earth into a conflagration which toppled governments,
destroyed entire cities, and claimed literally hundreds of millions of human lives. But Society still refused to repent.
The world returned to the pursuit of materialism, hedonism, and gross immorality as if nothing had happened. God visited man with a
period of continual high anxiety in the form of the Cold War. People built bomb shelters in their yards, and no one knew if their city or town
would even be around the next day, but could be vaporized by thermonuclear bombs in a matter of minutes.
God visited mankind with a series of unwinnable wars, such as Korea and Viet nam, where tens of thousands of soldiers and millions of
civilians died, But instead of repenting, society simply sunk deeper into depravity. The sexual revolution of the sixties and the rise of the
Hippy movement marked the acceptance of sexual promiscuity and the recreational use of narcotics into the mainstream of modern culture.
"But evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived." (2 Timothy 3:13)
The hippies and perverts of the sixties graduated from college, and went on to become politicians. Society replaced the renunciation of
money during the sixties, with the intense materialism and hedonism of the seventies and eighties. Insipid jerks like John Travolta paraded
as peacocks dressed in white suits, and the restraints were removed from Hollywood film makers. Now they could not only show nudity, but
could use the filthiest of language with impunity. That filthy conversation of the wicked, which so vexed Lot in the days of Sodom, carried
over into prime-time television and commercial radio broadcasting. It is now not unusual by any means to hear little children use the F-word,
and call each other bitches and "hos" during prime-time sitcoms. Commercial radio stations broadcast an endless profusion of excrement
under the guise of "Rap and Hip-Hop music" which regularly use words that would have gotten them thrown under the jail just a decade ago.
Instead of repentance, Society has dug in its heels, and cursed the God of Creation to his face, by legalizing the Abomination of
Desolation, which is homosexuality and lesbianism. Is it any wonder then, that God's creation is reacting to this gross defilement in a violent
manner? The earth is not spinning out of control, but is under the perfect control of God the Creator. All of creation is groaning and travailing,
just waiting for the Sons of God to be revealed.
"For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God.
For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope,
Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.
For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.
And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting
for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body." (Romans 8:19-23)
The earth is not spinning out of control, but is doing exactly what God has ordained that it should do when it becomes polluted and
defiled by unchecked wickedness: It is vomiting out its inhabitants.