Herbert W Armstrong

   The pestilence and the famine as it's called here, in other words, there going to be such a shortage of food and so much drought that disease epidemics will follow; that the physicians, the medical world will not be able to do anything with at all and as we read, I have read it to you back in the sixth chapter, I believe it is, of Ezekiel or the fifth chapter: One-third of our people are going to die in this terrible famine and disease epidemic that is coming. One-third of our people are going to die. Then, on the heels of that, that is the beginning of the tribulation. And on the heels of that will come this tribulation.

   Now, as I've mentioned to you, this great tribulation has both a national and an individual religious aspect. It's going to be a time of tremendous persecution and actual martyrdom of real saints. Of those that really believe the Bible, of those who have the testimony of Jesus Christ, and are keeping the commandments of God, and believe in obedience to God. The only reason that there aren't going to be millions upon millions that will be killed at that time is simply that there are not millions upon millions who today believe in keeping the commandments of God. But it's going to be the most terrible martyrdom that has ever happened. It's going to be very intensive. Now you find it in the ninth verse of Matt 24, "Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill you [now that is speaking of something personal when they deliver you up; that's speaking of individuals, Christian individuals, and the latter half of the same sentence is referring to the national aspect] and you shall be hated of all nations for my name's sake." Now, Sam Jones and John Smith or Ted Brown aren't going to be hated by whole nations.

   Whole nations don't go around hating individual people unless they are Presidents or leaders of great nations. That is speaking nationally. Now the same prophecy of Jesus Christ is recorded in Luke's gospel, in Luke 21. And you'll notice here, verses 11 and 12, "great earthquakes shall be in different places, famines, pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs" and so on, that is verse eleven, "But before all these, they shall lay hands on you, and persecute.., well it speaks of the signs from heaven. Now, before the signs from heaven in the sun and the moon and the stars will come the tribulation because the signs in the heaven, the sun, and the moon and the stars are immediately after The Great Tribulation as you read in Matthew 24 and verse 29. Now here, they shall lay hands on you and persecute you delivering you up to synagogues [that churches], and into prisons, being brought before kings and rulers for my name's sake." [Now, that's speaking privately and individually. Of individuals and that's a religious persecution. Delivering up to synagogues or churches. But then, turn now to verse 20 and on through verse 24.]

   When ye shall see Jerusalem compassed with armies, [Now it's speaking about armies, and great military maneuvers of nations] know then that the desolation thereof [That is of Jerusalem] is nigh. For verse 22 says, "These be the days of vengeance, that all things which are written may be fulfilled" [In other words, nearly almost all of the prophesies that at least have a duel application, the major application of which belongs to this time, and these prophesies are to be fulfilled at that time].

   Now there is a duel application in many prophesies and many of them did apply specifically to some event that is already happened way back there, some of them 2500 years ago, some of them 1900 years ago and so on. Each event was like a forerunner but there is going to be the great antitypical event that will happen at this time. And that's when all this thing that are written are to be fulfilled (Verse 22). Now, verse 24, ""And they [it's speaking of our people here, of our nation] they shall fall by the edge of the sword, and shall be led away captive into all nations: and Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled. Then after that, come the signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring; Men's hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things that are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken."" [That's when God will intervene immediately after the Great Tribulation, with the powers of heaven and the great tremendous signs, in the sun and the moon and the stars.]

   And so, my friends, the next things then to happen is the famine, the pestilence, and this Great Tribulation. Now here is something that many of us do not realize, The Great Tribulation, the time of The Great Tribulation, you've heard many speak of it in prophecy; but what they don't know is it is the time of our national trouble! Of the greatest national trouble on the United States of America that has ever happened. It's coming very, very soon. And it's coming on the United States. Now let me give it to you again. As I said before, you have to know who the United States is in prophecy. And I have mentioned the last several broadcasts our booklet, The United States in Prophecy that will explain it to you. If you haven't gotten it, write in for that special booklet The United States in Prophecy; there's no charge, there's no price on it. We'll be happy to send you a copy that is the very first kindergarten A, B, C of prophecy. It's the key that will unlock the prophesies of your Bible. And that is going to show you that the ancient Israelites, the children of Israel, were divided into two nations. That the birthright went to Ephraim and Manasseh that were in the northern nations called the House of Israel. That the Scepter promise, of which Christ came, went to the southern nation called Judah and then they became known as the Jews. And the term Jew has never been applied to any but the nation Judah never was it applied to the Northern Kingdom that was called Israel. Never! And the Northern Kingdom Israel was driven out in a national captivity back in the year 721 B.C. And it was way over a hundred years later, about a 130 years later before Judah was driven into her national captivity.

   Now God had said to His people back there in Leviticus 26, you shall make you neither idols nor graven images; to bow down unto it, I am the ETERNAL your God. Ye shall keep my Sabbaths, and reverence my sanctuary: I am the ETERNAL. If ye walk in my statutes, and keep my commandments, and do them; Then I will give you rain in due season, the land shall yield her increase, and it goes on the show that it would mean crops would be around the year and seasons and great wealth all of which comes out of the ground. And then God said "I will give peace in the land, and five of us will chase a hundred, and a hundred will put another ten thousand of our enemies to flight if they should invade or attack us: Peace, prosperity, that was the promise that God had made unconditionally to Abraham for his children and yet God said here you can have it if you obey.

   Well, Abraham had obeyed; it was unconditional to Abraham but it was only conditional to that particular generation of Abraham's children. You turn back to Genesis 26, verse five, I believe it is and you will find why Abraham got these very promises that are fulfilled in us today. Listen, my friends, if the Bible was not the inspired word of God, could any man have written that and brought it to pass? It came to pass! Every last detail that God promised Abraham has been fulfilled in us. Yes, it Genesis 26, verse five, where the promise was being fulfilled here to Isaac again, because it was to Abraham and to Isaac and to Jacob, because that Abraham obeyed my voice, kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes, and my laws. So said God Almighty there were His laws, His commandments 430 years before the Old Covenant or before the Mosaic Dispensation or the Leviticus Priesthood ever started. Oh my friends, some people need to read their Bibles a little bit and blow the dust off of them. Why the most overwhelming fulfillment of prophecy, my friends, in your Bible is the fulfillment of the promises that God made to Abraham. That are permitting us to have all the prosperity that we are have. Well we have things here in the United States that all our common people have, that people of other parts of the world have never dreamed of. My friends, we have all of this because God is faithful to keep His word, His promises, He promised it to Abraham. It didn't come through our merits, or our goodness or anything we have done.

   God said to His people back here in Leviticus 26, ""If you will harken to my voice, if you will keep my commandments and do them." Leviticus 26, "Ye shall make you neither idols nor graven image to bow down to it, for I am the ETERNAL your God. Ye shall keep my Sabbaths, and reverence my sanctuary: I am the ETERNAL. If ye walk in my statutes, and keep my commandments, and do them; Then I will give you rain in due season and the land shall yield her increase, and the trees of the field will yield their fruit. Your threshing shall reach unto the vintage, crops the year around. I will give peace in the land, ye shall lie down, and none shall make you afraid."" We would be prosperous, we would become wealthy, we would dominate the world.

   God determines the outcome of wars. God said, He would see, if we obeyed Him, we could always come out in victor if we were invaded in at war. Of course, to obey Him we wouldn't invade any other nation. But, listen, He said ""if do not harken unto me to do all of these commandments, [That was in the days of Moses and that generation at that time.] He said, I'll appoint over you terror, consumption, the burning ague, and so on. You'll sow your seed in vain; your enemies will eat it. You'll be slain by your enemies; they that hate you will reign over you; and I'll punish you seven times for your sins."" [Now that seven times is four times mentioned here in this one chapter. And that is a duration of 2520 years. In other words, these blessings that had been promised unconditionally to Abraham would be withheld for 2520 years unless they would obey them. Otherwise, they would be withheld 2520 years. Now, at the end of this 2520 years, God was absolutely bound to confer those blessings of the greatest national prosperity that had ever come upon any people on the face of this earth nationally. That had nothing to do with salvation; it had to do with race, not with grace. It had to do with nations, not with individuals. The nations that grew out of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And that birthright had gone to the sons of Joseph; Ephraim and Manasseh.

   Now, Israel did not obey, the birthright went into the Northern Kingdom. And I've shown you, how the first thing their very first King did when they rejected Rehoboam and appointed Jeroboam their king was to set up two golden calves, idols and going into idol worship, and then to change God's Sabbath. And He changed the annual Sabbaths that God given His people from the seventh to the eighth month. And the weekly from the seventh to the eighth day. God had only mentioned two commandments here, "you shall make you neither idols nor graven images; you shall keep my Sabbaths." And if they did not obey Him and those were the two commandments stressed; now that doesn't mean that they could break the other commandments with impunity at all. Those were the two that God knew they would most likely break. You know something, my friends; do know why people will tend to break those two more than any other? In the first place, why do people want to worship an idol? Because, no man at anytime has seen God. Why has God hid himself? God has never made himself visible. And human beings always want to worship something or somebody that they can see. Why, do you know that many people worship their pastors; their ministers? Sometimes we, here in the United States, have a hard time understanding how people that we have called heathen people could have ever made idols out of wood and stone and brass and gold and various things and worshipped those things. Sometimes they make them look like a man and sometime they make them look like a dragon and sometimes here they were like a calf.

   Well my friends, we draw pictures and we say, this is what your savior looks like that died for you on the cross. Now, he didn't look anything like those pictures at all. But people say, here's the savior that died. And all of the people get that picture in their mind. And they worship a mental image of that picture. That's idolatry. My friends, most of you have been doing that very thing. And I say, my friends, of course when you don't know what you're doing, God doesn't impute it until the knowledge comes. But once you know, God holds you accountable. And I say you'd better repent of that and asked God to forgive you and see that you don't do it anymore.

   You'll find the description of what Christ looks like now.., Christ is now glorified; you'll find the description in the later part of the very first chapter of Revelation in your Bible. Why His face shines like the sun in full strength. His eyes are like flames of fire; [He doesn't look like these pictures at all. A man can't draw a picture and make it just shine like the sun that would blind your eyes and practically put out you eyesight if you would look at it.] And so we do read too, in God's word that no man could look upon God and live. No wonder God hides Himself. But people want to worship something or some body they can see. So, there is always a temptation of one kind or another of idolatry. Only we thing of idols as just some image carve out of stone or marble or gold or something like that.

   Now, what about the Sabbath? Why is that such a temptation? Well, its the one and only command that God said remember and its the very one that everybody tried to forget and because people say that I can't see where it makes any difference whatsoever whether we keep God's Sabbath or a Sabbath that men want to choose. Now, I showed you here, in first kings, I believe it was, how this King of Israel set-up the golden calves and he changed God's annual Sabbaths.., well here it is, it's in I Kings 12, and verse thirty-three, so he offered on the altar which he had made in Bethel the fifteenth day of the eight month, even in the month which he had devised in his own heart and also the eighth day which the pagans had devised in their own heart. That was the day that the pagans always used or since their seven days a week, the eighth would be the one after the seventh or the one that is called the first day.

   And, so it is, now, I read to you from Ezekiel twenty, how God caused them to go forth out of the land of Egypt. He says, moreover I gave them also my Sabbaths, to be a sign between me and them, that they might know that I am the ETERNAL that does sanctify them. [That's sets them apart.] Now a sign identifies. And so it identified God so that they would know who God is and not worship idols. That was given to keep them from idolatry and also to identify them like an identifying tag that you would put right on a trunk or a suitcase or something to identify and that little identifying tag was God's Sabbath. Because no other nation, no other people ever kept it. There is only one reason you could see why it would make any difference which day, it's because God said so. And because God commanded it. And because you want to obey God instead of leaning to human reason and doing the thing that seemed right in your sight. Now, once we become obedient we can see why God said so and why God chose the day He did because it is a memorial of creation. And creation is the very proof of God. Creation points to God. And when you forget who the creator is; you forget who God is. All the people that have ever worshipped other gods have forgotten the Creator. And when the Apostle Paul wanted to tell the Athenian philosophers of Athens who the true God was and identify God: He said, God that made the worlds, and created all things and made all men of one blood; gives us one breath, the same air that we all breathe. That creator is God.

   Now, when we first pick-up those ten tribes, that were called the lost ten tribes; why were they called lost? Because they lost, because they gave up the sign that God had given them to identity them as His people! They quit keeping His Sabbath. And consequently, everybody thought they were Gentiles. Now, the Jews were sent to Babylon in their punishment also for the very same reason that they broke God's Sabbath. They didn't change it to another day, oh no, they kept the right day but they polluted it and they brought the burdens in through the gates of Jerusalem on the Sabbath day. And they worked on that day! And so, Nehemiah said, when they were doing that in those days, He said, I saw in Judah some treading winepresses on the Sabbath. Now, they had the right day. So he stood up against them. And he said here, verse eighteen, in the thirteen chapter of Nehemiah, "Did not your fathers thus and did not our God all this evil on us and upon this city? And yet you bring more wrath upon Israel by profaning the Sabbath." So then, they stopped it.

   Now, the Jewish people after they had gone back to Palestine, after the captivity in Babylon in the seventy years later when they went back under Ezra and Nehemiah, well after this rebuke right here that I just now read to you, they became the most strict Sabbatarians that the world has ever known. And by time that Jesus came in Palestine, they had invented about seventy different regulations and laws and rules of their own manmade now, of dos and don'ts to make the Sabbath a straitlaced yoke of bondage. So they accused Jesus of breaking the Sabbath. Jesus talked to them so much that it requires whole chapters in your New Testament of Gospel preaching to explain how to keep the Sabbath. He took away those traditions of men. The traditions of men is the one he labeled the writings of men that put these regulations on that day. He said, the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath. He didn't change to some other day. He kept that day as His custom was. Of course He did. It's about time we wake up, my friends, and read what is in the Bible.

   Now, they have always been identified then as the people of Israel. And they have always thought themselves Israel. The world has thought them as Israel. Well, they are Israelites. There no question about that. But you know, all Californians are Americans but all Americans are not Californians. I don't think the people of Florida would acknowledge being Californians with all due respect to you people down there in Florida that are listening and people in Illinois and Iowa are not Californians but we're all Americans. And so, my friends, all Jews are Israelites but all Israelites are not Jews. Only those that came from the Kingdom of Judah; the southern kingdom of the two nations or the two kingdoms.

   Now, when we pick up the so-called lost ten tribes, we pick up the peoples that became the English and the British people and the Celtic people and the people of northwestern Europe coming from the very place where we lose track of the ten tribes in history and consequently, we have ample proof that we are those very people. Now, as I mentioned before, if you want to get away from a thing you can't logically refute anything just try to laugh it out of school, sneer at it, ridicule it and people then are ashamed to take it up. But, if you want truth, write for this booklet, The United States in Prophecy. It is certainly an eye opener, its an astonishing thing, its the most fascination story you ever read. We are those people, The United States is the one great nation. That twenty-five hundred and twenty years was up in 1800 AD! From that time we spurted the great wealth and great national wealth.

   Now, what have we done? My friends, our land is full of idols only we don't make golden calves. We have different kind of idols today. And have we turned back to God's Sabbath? Well, some have, and those people are sneered at as having the Jewish Sabbath. My friend, God says my Sabbaths. What did He say here as I was reading it to you from Ezekiel 20, I said to their children in the wilderness walk not in the statues of your fathers neither observe their judgments or defiled yourselves with their idols, I am the ETERNAL your God; walk in my statutes, keep my judgments, and do them; Hallow my Sabbaths; and they'll be a sign between me and you, that ye may know that I am the ETERNAL your God.

   When Christ comes, He's going to deliver us from a captivity, from a slavery, that we're going into just as our forefathers went into a captivity and for the same reason. Then, we're going to know that He is the ETERNAL. But He's going to plead with us like He pleaded with them, He is going to purge out from among us the rebels, and we are going to come and loath ourselves for the very things that they did way back there when they were following their Father's ways instead of God's way. They followed their Fathers idols instead of the true God, their Fathers' Sabbaths instead of God's Sabbath. Oh my friends, how many of us are doing it. My friends, that thing is a national sin. Divorce is a national sin. We have many national sins right here in the United States that God says is sin! And things even in our religions today we pronounce as right and holy and I want to tell you there is a way that seems right to a man but it is not the way that is right to God. And the way to find God is to forsake our ways. Let the wicked forsake his ways, and the unrighteous man his thoughts and let him return unto God! Now, my friends, we're doing the same thing today after God has blessed us. He had to give us the wealth and the prosperity He did. He's had to give us peace in the land, He's had to give us these things. God won World War II and World War I for us. We didn't win it by our own strength. Don't you think we did because we didn't God almighty did it! By miracles we won those two wars because God did it for us. God was carrying out His faithful promise to Abraham because Abraham 430 years before the Old Covenant, 430 years before the Law of Moses, Abraham kept God commandments and His Statues and His Judgments. And for that reason, we have the prosperity we do. And what have we done with it? Oh, how we profane the holy things of God. And I want to tell you a captivity is coming to us. Now I want to get into that in the very next broadcast. I want to show you what the prophesies say is going to happen to the United States. What is prophesied to happen to the United States; I'm going to get into that completely and give you every detail and its prophesied in Jeremiah, it is in Micah, it is in Isaiah, it is in the prophesies all through your Bible. Be listening at this same hour, every day, and now listen.