This week on 'The Hal Lindsey Report'
If you've been watching coverage of the 2014 Winter Olympics from Sochi, Russia, you've seen Russian President Vladimir Putin from time to time. He's been playing host to the world, commiserating with his fellow countrymen when they lose, celebrating with them when they win, and putting on a good sport's face when their rivals win.
Overall, pundits and analysts are suggesting that he's doing a good job of selling Russia to the world, even though the weather hasn't been terribly cooperative and some of the facilities and services have garnered criticism from visiting journalists.
Of course, the Games started with a slap in Putin's face from quite a few western leaders when they refused to attend because of Russia's law forbidding homosexual "propaganda" and recruitment. President Obama went so far as to send a delegation of gay former athletes and Olympians to Sochi before the Games to emphasize his commitment to the rights of homosexuals around the world.
But apparently Putin wasn't impressed. The law is still on the books, the Games have gone on, and no terrorist attacks have interrupted them thus far. Overall, things seem to be going Putin's way.
And they seem to be going his way in other parts of the world, too. Particularly the Middle East.
After the Egyptian military removed President Mohamed Morsi, arrested the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, and stopped Egypt's headlong plunge into sharia law and Islamic statism, the Obama administration decided to withhold promised aid to the Egyptian government and deal with the new regime at arm's length. It's quite reminiscent of the tack America took in the late 1950's that drove Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser into the arms of the Soviet Union.
Well, the USSR no longer exists, but Russia does and its president longs for the old days when the USSR exerted enormous influence in the world, particularly in the Middle East. And he has open arms.
So the de facto leader of Egypt, General Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi paid Russian President Vladimir Putin a call in Moscow recently. And he was lavishly received with those open arms. In fact, in some of the news video, I saw Putin break into a smile - twice! Now that should warm al-Sisi's heart, indeed.
So now Egypt and Russia are working out a 3 billion dollar arms deal for MiG-29s, Mi35 helicopters, and inland and coastal defense systems. And who knows what else? In fact, in Egypt, Putin is now viewed as somewhat of a "savior."
President Obama, on the other hand, after delivering such exalted promises in his infamous Cairo speech, then pressing to see the Muslim Brotherhood installed in power and refusing to acknowledge that Egypt is better off without the thugs, is now reviled across the Middle East - especially in Egypt.
The world's media basically ignored the visit Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas paid to Moscow in late January. While there, he essentially dumped Secretary of State John Kerry's peace plan and sought Putin's backing for Palestinian statehood.
And if that's not enough, Iran has now begun making fresh overtures to Russia. They want to buy arms (I suppose the cash they're getting from the West since the sanctions have been eased is burning a hole in their pocket) and stage joint naval games with Russia (maybe in the Atlantic?).
But, as country picker Jerry Reed used to sing, "When you're hot, you're hot." And Putin is hot. Just as the prophets predicted.
In 1672, John Dryden wrote a play in which he extolled the virtues of the "noble savage." European elites loved it.
Over time, they began to see civilization itself as the great destroyer of human values. They began to believe that if humans were just left to their own devices, with no one preaching right or wrong to them or imposing ideas like marriage or justice, the innate goodness of humans would always rise to the surface and triumph.
Significantly, they saw Christianity as the main culprit in corrupting man's natural moral excellence.
In the fantasy, and in the movies, the "noble savage" is full of wisdom and goodness. In reality, though, if you showed up hungry on the doorstep of the "noble savage," he might serve you an entree or he might serve you AS the entree. But through the generations, the idea of the "noble savage" persisted.
Christians value each person as made in the image of God, but we also recognize humanity's fallen nature. The Bible says that man sins because we are sinners by birth. (See Romans 5:12 and on.)
The natural mind and the elites of the world hate that. We've been educated to believe that we are blank slates and that any bad characteristics we exhibit have been taught us by society, our parents, or the church. However, some recent studies show that the Bible was right all along.
In fact, Dr. Paul Bloom of Yale University commented, "Humans are born with a hard-wired morality, a sense of good and evil is bred in the bone."
Science, at last, may be starting to get it right, but those of us who trusted the Bible have gotten it right all along.
Archeologists from Tel Aviv University recently published research from an excavation in the Negev desert. They found some camel bones that carbon-dating suggests are from the 10th century B.C. In the press release, they mention that the Bible says that Abraham had camels even older than these, by more than a thousand years.
No big deal, right? Wrong. In the fevered, anti-Christian, and, perhaps delusional minds of the world media, that little statement suggests that this otherwise obscure find might bring into question the accuracy of the Bible. They were giddy with delight.
I'll share others on the show, but here's an example of how some respected publications abandoned their objectivity in reporting this "discovery." The Smithsonian headlined its article: "Here is Proof the Bibles Tales were Tweaked."
They insist that proof that domesticated camels existed in one part of Israel in the 10th century B.C. means they did NOT exist anywhere else in Israel before then. And that Biblical references to earlier camels are nothing more than a fiction. Which means that the Bible is lying and cannot be trusted.
Apparently, many of them do not understand that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
A writer for The Guardian of London even speculated that the discovery of "the old Testament's made-up camels are a problem for Zionism." Unbelievably, he used the discovery of some 3,000-year old camel bones to undermine Israel's right to exist!
I'm not making this up. Welcome to the end-times, folks.
For years now, conservatives and some moderates have been warning about the danger inherent in a United Nations initiative called Agenda 21. Though I covered this on my old television program on TBN in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I've not discussed it recently.
As we see growing chaos across the world, much of it exacerbated by an out-of-control environmentalist mindset (of which the bogus "man-made" climate change hoax is just the tip of the iceberg and the death of farming in America's most fertile valley is a result), the bizarre and draconian effects of Agenda 21 will become more apparent.
In fact, it is such a threat to our own national sovereignty that I want to quote just a portion of a statement by an organization called Democrats Against UN Agenda 21: "The plan calls for governments to take control of all land use and not leave any of the decision making in the hands of the private property owners. It is assumed that people are not good stewards... and the government will do a better job.... Individual rights in general are to give way to the needs of the communities as determined by the governing body. Moreover, people should be rounded up off the land and packed into human settlements, or islands of human habitation...."
And to show you I'm not just quoting the opposition, here's what Dr. Ottmar Edenhofer, one of the prominent scientists promoting Agenda 21, recently admitted: "Developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community. But one must clearly say that we redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy."
Had the ancient prophets predicted that one day the elites of the world would seek to control the world by regulating the air we breathe and then taxing each breath, they would have been laughed out of the prophets' club. Once again, welcome to the end-times, folks.
Don't miss this week's Report on TBN, Daystar, CPM Network, The Word Network, various local stations, www.hallindsey.com or www.hischannel.com. Please check your local listings.
God Bless,
Hal Lindsey
Subject: This week on 'The Hal Lindsey Report' 
Fri Feb 21, 2014 11:28 am
