Today’s seventh day sabbath message 05/12/23 is a reblog of last year’s seventh day sabbath message 05/14/22. It is still the seventh day sabbath, Friday sunset to Saturday sunset, however it is a different calendar date by tw days. I was born on August 31st according to the Gregorian Calendar; however, the day of the week varies from year to year. The weekly sabbath is the seventh day of the week but the monthly dates varies month to month from year to year, even on the lunar based calendar. There are seven days to the week and have always been! Also, they are the same on both types of calendars. They read left to right 1 thru 7 as Sunday thru Saturday, except on computers which begin with Saturday and end with Sunday as day 7 thru 1, which is how man programed them….

NOT GOD!!

Oh my leanness, I cannot count the ways man is trying to cancel God!!

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A Sabbath Message 05/14/22 – A Beyond Today Article

Got my Beyond Today bimonthly magazine this week and one of it articles in “The Conspiracy to CANCEL GOD” cover was so truthful in what is happening in this nation today, I have chosen to use it for today’s message.

Cancel Culture and the Future of Christianity

In the streets of Jerusalem, the apostles Peter and John experienced great success in preaching the gospel of the Kingdom. Following the spectacular response on the Day of Pentecost, when some 3,000 had been converted, God had opened the minds of hundreds of others to the gospel message. Before long the Church at Jerusalem numbered in the thousands (Acts 2:41, 47; 4:1).

The Sanhedrin, the highest Jewish judicial council, took notice of the apostles’ success. Largely composed of Sadducees, a priestly sect who controlled the Jerusalem temple, they viewed the growing power and influence of Jesus Christ’s message as a threat. Peter and the other apostles had to be stopped.

An occasion to arrest Peter and John presented itself when they miraculously healed a man who was lame from birth (Acts 3). With the temple guard to provide muscle, the Sanhedrin leaders swept in and seized the two apostles (Acts 4:1-6).

“By what power or what name did you do this?” they demanded of Peter and John (verse 7, New International Version). Peter answered them, “It is by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified but whom God raised from the dead, that this man stands before you healed” (verse 10, NIV).

The Sanhedrin could not deny that many had witnessed the healing. This was no fluke. So in what was in essence an early case of attempted cancel culture, the Sanhedrin put a gag order on the apostles, ordering them to cease preaching in the name of Christ. But Peter boldly responded: “Judge for yourselves whether it is right in God’s sight to obey you rather than God. For we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:17, NIV 1984, emphasis added throughout). They refused to be canceled!

Today in America we see cancel culture everywhere, but no one is more targeted than religious Americans, especially Christians. Traditional morals, ethics and values are under assault. Those who hold the Judeo-Christian values that were common for the first 200 years of the nation’s existence now find themselves mocked, belittled and attacked if they dare to express or stand up for their views.

As the influence of atheistic, secular humanist culture grows, it strives to obliterate references to God and Christianity in the workplace, on social media, in the classroom, in government and in mainstream media. And when God and Christianity are mentioned in these venues, it’s often in a hateful, disparaging way.

Traditional values banned as Christian belief declines

Despite being founded on a Judeo-Christian ethic, religious influence in America has steadily waned, as shown by the most recent statistics from the Public Religion Research Institute.

Its survey showed that the proportion of white Americans identifying as evangelicals dropped from 23 percent in 2006 to 14.5 percent in 2020. White Catholics dropped from 16 percent to 11.7 percent. During the same time, the percentage of respondents of all ethnicities not affiliated with any religion increased from 16 percent to nearly 24 percent.

This has gone hand-in-hand with assaults on traditional values. Anti-God secularists have conducted a decades-long war on Christianity with the goal of expunging it from American life.

Classroom prayer, for example, was common in American public schools for the first nearly two centuries of the nation’s history. But in a complete corruption of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1962 that the practice violated the First Amendment—in spite of the amendment’s plain wording that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . .”

Free exercise of religion in schools was banned overnight. The following year the Supreme Court banned Bibles from schools. These two rulings have been used to suppress the free exercise of religion in the United States ever since.

Vile practices legalized and normalized

God is the Creator of life. All life is precious to Him, and that includes the life of unborn children. Yet just 10 years later the court declared that American women had a “constitutional right” to abort the tiny lives growing within them—despite not seeing such a right in the Constitution in the nearly 200 years before. Some 60 million unborn babies have been murdered in America since then—a number greater than the population of most countries.

If that weren’t bad enough, in 2015 the court struck down all restrictions on homosexual marriage. Then in 2020 it issued a ruling that redefined the meaning of “sex” (in discrimination law) to include sexual orientation and personally chosen gender identity —so that men could now claim to be women and women could claim to be men, with everyone legally obligated to accept such obvious fantasies as true and normal.

As a result, speaking out against abortion or the LGBTQ agenda as being opposed to basic morality and even scientific reality brings a torrent of pushback, with these views excoriated as hate speech and homophobia.

Now gender roles are seen as “culturally defined,” ignoring obvious biological differences. Don’t want to identify as male or female? No problem, says Facebook, which since 2014 has offered 56 ways to self-identify in terms of one’s sex, including agender (no gender at all), transgender (gender identity opposite from biological gender), MTF (transitioning from male to female) and pangender (being all genders simultaneously).

Not to be outdone, Apple has introduced a new emoji for its phones—a pregnant man. And the rest of us are expected to accept such absurdities as normal and true.

Free speech: an antiquated notion

America has come to the point where only one set of beliefs, one worldview, is allowed by those who control the levers of power, with any divergence from that censured and banned. Whatever happened to free speech, to the right to express a wide variety of views?

America’s Founding Fathers viewed freedom of speech as a basic right. Our rights, the signers of the Declaration of Independence understood, came not from government but from our Creator.

When many of those same men later came together to frame the U.S. Constitution, they took the additional step of securing people’s rights in a series of amendments to the Constitution known as the Bill of Rights. The First Amendment guaranteed freedom of speech, religion and the press. For more than two centuries these freedoms have allowed Americans to speak out on virtually any issue. Government for the most part protected these rights, even on highly controversial or unpopular positions.

But over the past decade, respect for these rights has quickly eroded. Freedom of expression has given way to a new orthodoxy. What started out as “politically correct” attitudes in the 1990s have now morphed into broad requirement, with heavy societal pressure, to express only what liberal-progressive “thought police” permit. With breathtaking speed, this new “woke” culture has vilified and in some cases even criminalized free speech in America.

Social media a driving force for censorship

Historically, the American media has championed freedom of speech and the press. But evidence is mounting that the media establishment now actually wants to limit free speech. Religious and conservative people increasingly find their views censored and canceled.

More than two-thirds of all Americans use social media—Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok and others—to stay connected to friends, family, coworkers and others. But as we have seen these platforms grow in popularity, we have also seen them grow in power. And these platforms have clearly stepped over the line into censorship and manipulation of political and cultural thought.

They and their corporate leaders especially dislike religious and conservative expression.

Facebook employs a small army of “content monitors,” whose job is to filter out religious or conservative content. Their guidelines on hate speech explicitly condemn speech that might offend anyone based on sexual orientation, gender or gender identity. But those guidelines have been used to cancel speech that expresses religious, traditional or conservative views.

It isn’t hard to understand the bias of these tech giants. They largely reflect the attitudes and practices of the far-left “woke” culture. They apply those biases as the new arbiters of information, controlling what information gets disseminated and what gets canceled.

Their power in this regard is breathtaking. Twitter banned then-President Donald Trump after he raised allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 election.

Twitter, Facebook and Google-owned YouTube have been proven to routinely block and delete conservative or religious content. While their guidelines claim fairness to all groups and prohibit obvious hate speech, religious and conservative groups have reported deletion of their posts, and others have reported their posts as “shadow banned”—deliberately hidden from most public viewing.

Major Internet search engines like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Bing have been accused of manipulating results to deprioritize and hide conservative and religious content and news unfavorable to liberal causes and politicians—conveniently labeled “misinformation.”

How did it get this bad?

There is growing awareness that the progressive left has for a long time been waging a war on God, Christianity and biblical morality. But why does it seem that the war has intensified in recent years?

While the leftist cause to bring a secular humanist form of salvation to an evil, unjust world has been ongoing for nearly 200 years, its efforts to drive God out of American life shifted into overdrive relatively recently with the radical “free speech” movement of the 1960s.

Author David Horowitz was himself a student radical during the 1960s who became a conservative in the early 1980s after he became disgusted with the evils of the left. In Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America, Horowitz shows how the left mocks Christians for prayer and belief in God. He shows the depth of hatred Marxists have towards Christianity.

Referring to the millions of Christians murdered in totalitarian regimes in the 20th century, Horowitz writes: “Radicals in America today don’t have the political power to execute people and destroy their houses of worship. Yet they openly declare their desire to obliterate religion. In their own minds, their intentions are noble—they want to save the human race from the social injustice and oppression that religion allegedly inflicts on humanity” (2018, p. 4).

In other words, the left sees those who believe in biblical values as ignorant, superstitious people who need to be reeducated—or eliminated if they can’t be reformed—to save the world.

Growing government persecution of Christianity

In recent years Australia, Canada, Great Britain and other Western nations have passed “hate speech” laws that prohibit teaching what the Bible says about homosexuality, transgenderism and false religion. As a result, pastors and others speaking out on morality have been fined and jailed for simply quoting what the Bible says. Similar laws have been pushed in the United States but so far have been blocked—yet that might not always be the case.

During his 2008 campaign for the presidency, Barack Obama openly ridiculed several biblical laws. In an unguarded moment at a San Francisco fundraiser with wealthy donors, he revealed his personal contempt for small-town religious Americans: “They get bitter, they cling to their guns or religion or antipathy to people who are not like them . . . as a way to explain their frustrations.”

When, as president, he managed to get his Obamacare legislation passed, he took aim at religious organizations that opposed the law’s mandates to provide contraceptives and even abortion-inducing drugs. A Catholic order, the Little Sisters of the Poor, opposed these requirements.

Obama vindictively retaliated with all the power of the federal government, forcing the Little Sisters to undertake years of costly legal battles. This went on until in 2016 the Supreme Court ruled, in a rare unanimous vote, in favor of the Little Sisters and their First Amendment rights.

National, state and local governments of major Western countries used the recent Covid pandemic to openly discriminate against and persecute churches. Regulations shut down or tightly restricted what churches were able to do while allowing other businesses, including bars, liquor stores and marijuana shops, to stay open. Some churches successfully sued over such blatant discrimination, only then being allowed to reopen.

Meanwhile, the U.S. military denied 99.9 percent of approximately 16,000 requests for religious exemptions for mandated Covid vaccines and is in the process of expelling thousands of valuable trained personnel.

At the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court repeatedly refused to hear appeals on Covid vaccine mandates from individuals and groups arguing that being forced to take vaccines they saw as potentially harmful, many of which were developed using aborted fetal cells, violated their religious beliefs and convictions. Millions of Americans were forced to violate their conscience or lose their jobs.

Enduring the dominion of the demonic

What is all of this leading to? Is there an endgame in play in which canceling God from the public arena is a major step? Revelation 13 describes an emerging worldwide governmental system called “the beast” that arises with control over much of humanity. That system will wage war against those who follow God’s Word, while gaining the admiration of most of the world.

The Beast is the term used for both the evil political empire and its tremendously powerful leader operating under the influence of “the dragon,” identified as Satan. “The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and great authority” (verse 2, NIV).

The prophecy also shows the Beast aligning with a false religious system masquerading as Christian. This coalition goes on to “wage war against God’s holy people,” with the world at large submitting to its rule, so that “all inhabitants of the earth will worship the beast” (verses 7-8, NIV).

Already, cancel culture’s war on biblical morality has done much to turn nations toward that darker path. Your Bible indicates this situation will only get worse. Individuals cannot change this, yet there is hope and purpose for each person who commits to resisting Satan’s grip on society and on his or her own life. Stand for God and His ways!

By Mike Kelly, Posted on Apr 20, 2022

From Beyond Today magazine. For other articles and free subscription, go to:

https://www.beyond-today.ca/beyond-today-magazine/issues/?get=/beyond-today/beyond-today-magazine/beyond-today-magazine-may-june-2022

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Isaiah 24

KJV^(i) 1 Behold, the LORD maketh the earth empty, and maketh it waste, and turneth it upside down, and scattereth abroad the inhabitants thereof. ² And it shall be, as with the people, so with the priest; as with the servant, so with his master; as with the maid, so with her mistress; as with the buyer, so with the seller; as with the lender, so with the borrower; as with the taker of usury, so with the giver of usury to him. ³ The land shall be utterly emptied, and utterly spoiled: for the LORD hath spoken this word. ⁴ The earth mourneth and fadeth away, the world languisheth and fadeth away, the haughty people of the earth do languish. ⁵ The earth also is defiled under the inhabitants thereof; because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant. ⁶ Therefore hath the curse devoured the earth, and they that dwell therein are desolate: therefore the inhabitants of the earth are burned, and few men left. ⁷ The new wine mourneth, the vine languisheth, all the merryhearted do sigh. ⁸ The mirth of tabrets ceaseth, the noise of them that rejoice endeth, the joy of the harp ceaseth. ⁹ They shall not drink wine with a song; strong drink shall be bitter to them that drink it. ¹⁰ The city of confusion is broken down: every house is shut up, that no man may come in. ¹¹ There is a crying for wine in the streets; all joy is darkened, the mirth of the land is gone. ¹² In the city is left desolation, and the gate is smitten with destruction. ¹³ When thus it shall be in the midst of the land among the people, there shall be as the shaking of an olive tree, and as the gleaning grapes when the vintage is done. ¹⁴ They shall lift up their voice, they shall sing for the majesty of the LORD, they shall cry aloud from the sea. ¹⁵ Wherefore glorify ye the LORD in the fires, even the name of the LORD God of Israel in the isles of the sea. ¹⁶ From the uttermost part of the earth have we heard songs, even glory to the righteous. But I said, My leanness, my leanness, woe unto me! the treacherous dealers have dealt treacherously; yea, the treacherous dealers have dealt very treacherously. ¹⁷ Fear, and the pit, and the snare, are upon thee, O inhabitant of the earth. ¹⁸ And it shall come to pass, that he who fleeth from the noise of the fear shall fall into the pit; and he that cometh up out of the midst of the pit shall be taken in the snare: for the windows from on high are open, and the foundations of the earth do shake. ¹⁹ The earth is utterly broken down, the earth is clean dissolved, the earth is moved exceedingly. ²⁰ The earth shall reel to and fro like a drunkard, and shall be removed like a cottage; and the transgression thereof shall be heavy upon it; and it shall fall, and not rise again. ²¹ And it shall come to pass in that day, that the LORD shall punish the host of the high ones that are on high, and the kings of the earth upon the earth. ²² And they shall be gathered together, as prisoners are gathered in the pit, and shall be shut up in the prison, and after many days shall they be visited. ²³ Then the moon shall be confounded, and the sun ashamed, when the LORD of hosts shall reign in mount Zion, and in Jerusalem, and before his ancients gloriously.

Have a restful and peaceful sabbath.

LOLGB+

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Daniel 7:25

(KJV) And he shall speak great words against the most High, and shall wear out the saints of the most High, and think to change times and laws: and they shall be given into his hand until a time and times and the dividing of time.

Isaiah 24:5

(KJV) The earth also is defiled under the inhabitants thereof; because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant.

Isaiah 56

KJV^(i) 1 Thus saith the LORD, Keep ye judgment, and do justice: for my salvation is near to come, and my righteousness to be revealed. ² Blessed is the man that doeth this, and the son of man that layeth hold on it; that keepeth the sabbath from polluting it, and keepeth his hand from doing any evil. ³ Neither let the son of the stranger, that hath joined himself to the LORD, speak, saying, The LORD hath utterly separated me from his people: neither let the eunuch say, Behold, I am a dry tree. ⁴ For thus saith the LORD unto the eunuchs that keep my sabbaths, and choose the things that please me, and take hold of my covenant; ⁵ Even unto them will I give in mine house and within my walls a place and a name better than of sons and of daughters: I will give them an everlasting name, that shall not be cut off. ⁶ Also the sons of the stranger, that join themselves to the LORD, to serve him, and to love the name of the LORD, to be his servants, every one that keepeth the sabbath from polluting it, and taketh hold of my covenant; ⁷ Even them will I bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer: their burnt offerings and their sacrifices shall be accepted upon mine altar; for mine house shall be called an house of prayer for all people. ⁸ The Lord GOD, which gathereth the outcasts of Israel saith, Yet will I gather others to him, beside those that are gathered unto him. ⁹ All ye beasts of the field, come to devour, yea, all ye beasts in the forest. ¹⁰ His watchmen are blind: they are all ignorant, they are all dumb dogs, they cannot bark; sleeping, lying down, loving to slumber. ¹¹ Yea, they are greedy dogs which can never have enough, and they are shepherds that cannot understand: they all look to their own way, every one for his gain, from his quarter. ¹² Come ye, say they, I will fetch wine, and we will fill ourselves with strong drink; and to morrow shall be as this day, and much more abundant.

Revelation 12:17

(KJV) And the dragon was wroth with the woman, and went to make war with the remnant of her seed, which keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ.

Revelation 14:12

(KJV) Here is the patience of the saints: here are they that keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus.

Revelation 19:15

(KJV) And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations: and he shall rule them with a rod of iron: and he treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God.

Revelation 22:14

Blessed are they that do his commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the city.

Only one commandment tell us to remember something!

Shabatt shalom,

eze33, LOLGB+