“Jubileer” or “April Fool”?
[Editor’s Note: This is the first of five "Your Jubilee in 2010" articles being released, with the second entitled, "Our National Jubilee's Forgiveness Factors"; the third, "Your Personal Jubilee’s Forgiveness Factors”; the fourth, “Getting Psyched Up for Your Personal Year of Jubilee; and the fifth, "Crucial Steps into Your Personal Year of Jubilee.” The Jubilee Series is a section at the heart of Ken Talbott's forthcoming book, Judo Politics--The Transformation of the Electorate that Upsets Big Brother, to be published this Spring. To access the entire series, click on “Your Jubilee in 2010” Series under the Categories section to the right.
MR. PRESIDENT: It is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth—and listen to the song of that siren, till she transforms us into beasts. Is this the part of wise men, engaged in a great and arduous struggle for liberty? Are we disposed to be of the number of those, who having eyes, see not, and having ears, hear not, the things which so nearly concern their temporal salvation? For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it. . . . Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"
—The introduction and conclusion of Patrick Henry’s famous 1775 speech to America’s founders about the immanent British military threat.
April 1, 2010
Dear Walk Show family,
Speaking of liberty versus death, I re-checked the mortality rates in Washington, and they’re still hovering somewhere around 100 percent—at “one death per person.” If I were to drop dead tomorrow—and that is always a possibility, for I, like you, am living on borrowed time—the following is the central message of liberty I would wish to share with you today and in the next four articles in this "Jubilee" (meaning, "Liberty") series. Here’s just a tip-off in advance: such liberty starts with you and me personally!
What I wish to sound is a liberty-or-death warning concerning your life and role in what we might call The Second American Revolution. Yet, the Revolution being called for is quite unlike any revolution we have ever seen before. If you are to be a fighter in this type of revolution, I maintain that you must first and foremost become a "Jubileer." So, what's that?
In Old Testament times God instructed the Children of Israel to observe a Jubilee (meaning, “Liberty”) every fifty years, in which all debts were erased, prisoners and slaves were set free, and all land returned to its original owners. From my viewpoint, Americans and American Christians, in particular, are in desperate need of a Jubilee of their own, if, indeed, there is to be a future for our Republic.
What will that Jubilee look like, and what will it take for us to become the "Jubileers" who experience the Jubilee's liberty for ourselves? And, what must us Jubileers do if we are to help others into their personal and national Jubilee, as well?
What I am about to say just happens to be the very distilled essence of my forthcoming book, Judo Politics—The Transformation of the Electorate that Upsets Big Brother. So much so that if you really “get” what I’m trying to say in this, the heartbeat of the book, you might not even need to read Judo Politics! Literally all the issues of life in our nation will, I believe, be found to flow out of this distilled essence.
The threats now facing those of us in our American Constitutional Republic are no less serious today than were the threats spoken of by Patrick Henry at the emergence of the first American Revolution. This call to “Your Personal Jubilee,” or “liberty,” followed by a national expression of the Jubilee, is, in my opinion, our only remaining, viable response to these threats—perhaps hidden right in plain sight.
Look! What's that Funny Line on the Horizon?
The driving energy of a tsunami, as very distinct from a normal wave, moves through the open ocean water, as opposed to on top of it, at speeds of up to 600 miles per hour--the speed of a commercial airliner. Largely undetectable in the open ocean, a tsunami is typically no more than three feet high until it gets close to shore. Not until it piles up into a tidal wave close to the beach can it be seen, and by that time it is usually too late to get out of its destructive path.
Multiple global earthquakes have already occurred. Just tracking the effects of the financial earthquake alone, the tsunami is seen to be rushing right toward us. Most Americans, rejoicing over the many economic-recovery predictions as well as the unexpectedly super-low tide of interest rates, eagerly dig for clams on the beach with their heads almost completely in the sand. Yet, there's a strange-looking line forming up on the ocean horizon. "Look! It's just about to crash in on the last two rings of reefs protecting our shores--derivatives and commercial real estate!"
Cresting current events have already narrowly limited our options. As I see it, today, April 1st, 2010, we only have two choices remaining: either start functioning immediately as what I like to call, “Jubileers” (a type of fiercely loyal and proactive minority) who will fight ourselves to higher ground, or prove ourselves “April Fools”!
The list of optional choices presented in this series of five “Jubilee” articles could well usher you into your own personal Jubilee over the next twelve months--including seeing you released from all of your various types of debts, should you be willing to make the tougher of the choices presented to you. Your Jubilee choices could allow you to take full advantage of all of the challenges and opportunities in the time of great waves immediately ahead.
Yes, whether or not you enter into your personal Year of Jubilee right now could well become a matter of Lifestyle or Deathstyle—not just for your life, family, friends, community, and nation, but for the very Republic itself.
Please allow me to start with the bold assertion that the tsunami heading straight for us appears to be rapidly increasing in force and momentum, so we simply must snap out of our stupor right this instant and make a giant, Jubilee leap—while the vast majority of Americans (and what calls itself the American church) remain frozen in their tracks like deer caught in the headlights. In a nutshell, here’s my thesis:
You have only a matter of days or weeks now to take whatever action you need to take to get yourself re-structured and re-positioned for the upcoming social, economic, political, and spiritual upheaval and the fantastic opportunities it will carry with it. In other words, it’s either a personal “Jubilee” for you, starting today, or “April Fools!”
With Every Challenge Comes an Opportunity (Often in Disguise)
As the perfect financial storm approaches with its tidal wave in front, do you think that God is worried about the economy? Should you and I be? My good friend and business associate, the late Arvis B. (”A. B.”) Walker, used to say, “It doesn’t matter what the economy is doing; what matters is what side of it you are working!”
To underline his thought, I remember meeting the late Ruth Kerr, president of Kerr Glass Manufacturing Company, when she was in her 90’s. When her husband, Alex, died just before the 1929 start of the first Great Depression, Ruth found herself running her company on the right side of the market! Everybody was canning, and the canning operations in the agricultural sections of the country gave her company the largest volume on record two years into the Depression in 1931! She boomed while millions went bust!
I’m told canning is up 35% in America over this past year.
As the inevitable tsunami approaches, I trust you will soon see that Judo Politics is my own faith-filled attempt at finding the opportunity in the cataclysm. You see, while others have been digging clams, the Jubilee process to be described herein will be like fashioning a surfboard! And, the message of this "Jubilee" section is: "Get yourself ready for a wild ride!"
Like that surfboard, your first and foremost “secret weapon” in this cataclysmic struggle is one entirely within your grasp—the awe-inspiring, life-transforming, Big-Brother-upsetting power of forgiveness in Jesus Christ! That may sound vague or even esoteric, but what I am going to speak of is the your means of riding the crest of the wave of destruction. Please let me explain by starting with the “apparent” crisis threatening our Constitutional Republic, then delving down to some of the real issues below the apparent issues—issues that involve you and yours personally.
“Unsustainable-but-Reversible” or “Irreversible”?
I can no longer see the situation as “unsustainable-but-reversible,” as the Congressional Budget Office Director, the White House Budget Director, and even the Fed Chairman (representing those who have created this fiscal mess) have all recently intimated. I am now thoroughly convinced that it has become “irreversible.”
Not only does the government now control more than half of the American economy, the government is easily construable to be technically bankrupt. Over $110 trillion in unfunded liabilities is yet one more witness against the government leach, which has already convincingly demonstrated for us all that it has no regard whatsoever for the life of its host—“We the People.”
In the remote case that you don’t think we’re past the tipping point, just consider these two, telling indicators (among dozens) that the leach continues to suck the life out of our Republic:
1) Our U. S. Congress has plundered your life’s savings in the Social Security “Trust” Fund. Is there any other way of viewing them than as the greatest thieves in the history of the planet? The fact that they altruistically fancy themselves as “Robin Hoods” in no way masks their theft and redistribution efforts, and it most certainly tempts one to conclude that simply voting them out of office alone could in no way atone for the irreparable damage they have done to all of us American citizens.
2) As of 2008, the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis reveals that the average federal government salary is now $119,982, compared with the average private-sector salary $59,909. Add to that benefits like health care and pensions, and the fed workers get an additional $40,785, as compared to the average working taxpayer, who gets only $9,881 in benefits. What this means is that federal workers get twice the salary and four times the benefits of the citizens who hire them. State and local government compensation works out to be at about the same ratio to working taxpayers' compensation.
Should that not be a signal to all (except perhaps the deer in the headlights) who it is that is already wielding the greater power--"We the People" or the government leech?
Effective last month’s health care tipping point, I see no way around the disaster—only through it. The “British” have already invaded the colonies. The “World War” has already started in Poland. The “Titanic” has already hit the iceberg at flank speed, while Americans busy themselves re-arranging the deck chairs, and the ship’s worship band amps up the volume as the parishioners scatter from the ship’s ornate, “super church” salon.
Churchill’s warnings about Hitler’s intentions, as it were, have gone unheeded, and the claptrap about “hope and change we can believe in” is already as empty as British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s promise of “peace in our time.” Europe, as it were, is under siege and soon bombs will be raining down on London and Pearl Harbor, sucking us all into the War. Yet, it’s as if a deep, deluding spell is over the minds of the whole culture and its enculturated church.
I sure hope this doesn’t apply to you, but as a talk show host with extensive contact with the American public—and with American “Christians,” in particular—I simply must ask this question right out of the gun: “What’s it gonna take to wake you up to the seriousness of what is facing us? Are you able to hear the Holy Spirit’s still, small voice in this warning, or would something like an EMP be required to get you to wake up and smell the cold-brewed coffee?”
“If the Rapture Comes, Will You Take My Sunday School Class?”
In the spirit of the Apostle Paul’s words—“Remember that for three years I never stopped warning each of you night and day with tears” (cf., Acts 20:31)—just what is it that I have similarly warned you about and cried over these past three years? It might be summed up with, “Repent, Restructure, Reposition!” Yes, and do so quickly—not in the way Ken Talbott might suggest, but in accordance with what the Spirit directs you—culturally, financially, geographically, politically, etc.—but first and foremost, spiritually!”
Everywhere I look Americans (and Christians, in particular) are deep in fear, asleep, in paralysis, or even in apparent outright delusion. These multitudes of the somnolent are curled up in prenatal positions, thumbs inserted in mouth, as the consequences of their indecision letter-by-letter spell out the word: “D I S A S T E R!” Many of those who call themselves Christians are completely bailed out, hoping like hell to be raptured out of their Mercedes on the way to a Seahawks game.
Jesus predicted this very phenomenon, explaining in Matthew 24:37-41 how the evil ones will be taken away, whether it be the evil man working in the field (v.40) or the evil woman grinding with a hand mill (v.41) . . . just like they were in the days of Noah:
. . . they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took [or swept, or took away] them all away to judgment. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man (v. 39).
The Walk Show’s “resident Biblical scholar,” Dr. Stephen Crosby, comes down on this one with:
Matt 24:37 ff., is one of those passages that ruins a lot of tidy eschatology [i.e., the understanding of “the last days”]. Jesus is making a comparison. The question is, comparing what to what? It seems plain that whatever is going on, it is not the righteous being removed from the earth, but the wicked in judgment. The last days, whatever one thinks of them, are being compared to the days of Noah, in which the righteous were spared and remained and the wicked removed.
This has implications for what one believes about eternal destiny. I have always found it odd that so many people who are literal futurists want to get out of the place Jesus is supposedly returning to, and want to spend eternity in a place Jesus has left (if the literal futurists are correct).
It is pretty sobering news that believers would allow the spirit of the age over the past century to morph their eschatology so completely. Our “bail-out theology” certainly bears witness to our advanced stage of assimilation by a surrounding, decaying culture, that wants to avoid pain at all costs in its vain pursuit of pleasure. What tipping point must the church itself have passed if we are willing to be manipulated and manipulate others into including ourselves among the evil ones who get swept off the face of the earth? Here’s hoping that this mass delusion already permeating our age and its corrupted church will soon be “left behind” by the Jubileers!
We’re told that Luther, when asked what he’d do if he knew Jesus were coming tomorrow, responded with, “I’d plant a tree today!” Yes, Jesus wants us to “occupy until I return” (Luke 19:13), and when He does, the evil ones may be swept away to some hot spot somewhere, but the church will be quite busy reigning with Christ for at least the first 1,000 years.
Speaking of life down here on earth, “acts of God” recently gave us “the parable of the earthquakes,” in which the Chilean quake was 500 times stronger than the Haitian quake, but the lesser shaking did so much more damage than the greater shaking. How could this be?
Our friend, Pat Robertson, was almost universally mocked (including in the church, which lustily sucks in the worldview of its secular media mentors) when all Pat did was suggest the plight of Haitians might be spiritual at its core. What else could explain the fact that two nations share the same island, but Haiti even before the quake was a barren wasteland in every sense of the word, while its neighboring Dominican Republic is verdant and prosperous in comparison?
The spiritual plague that has devastated Haiti could easily be characterized as a lack of “repentance, restructuring, and repositioning.” That might not only make Pat a prophet; it could render America, and what calls itself the American church, the “Haiti” in the parable. Or, shall we say, “the April Fools”?
“Rise Up, O Fiercely Loyal Minority!”
It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery (Galatians 5:1).
On the other hand, our God is a God of true hope, of genuine change we can really believe in, and of resurrection power. I believe He’s on the lookout for that “remnant” somewhere out there who are ready to be resurrected and mobilized via their own personal Jubilees! While the Bible describes the “remnant” as a small group who will find salvation, survive, and eventually thrive after an enemy invasion, Eugene Peterson in his The Message (Bible translation) refers to the remnant as the “fiercely loyal minority.” I like that.
In accordance with our theme that our problem is much more with the professing church than with the culture, T. Austin Sparks stops the buck right where it belongs:
There is another word which just means that which has escaped from slavery and is breathing free air. That is a fine picture, a fine portrait for Overcomers - that which has escaped from slavery and is breathing free air. . . . Some of us, even in our Christian lives and histories, know what it is to escape from slavery. Oh, the old bondage of the Christian system and order, expectation and demand, all the old rota and legality!- -to be free of it all! Not only to be raised with Christ, but to have the grave-clothes taken off and to be breathing the free air of the spiritually emancipated! That is what this word calls a remnant, and that is not something extra to Christianity. It is exactly what you find at the beginning with the Church (Overcomer Testimony, Chapter 2).
Through a lengthy process characterized by much agony and ecstasy, this fiercely loyal minority is being refined, coming to know who they are, and beginning to discover one another–both within and without the framework of the apostate American institutional expressions of the church. Thereby they are becoming the “seers” of our age, as well as the “doers”—indeed, the “fiercely loyal and proactive minority”! I have met and am daily meeting a tiny portion of them—a minority within the minority.
“Oh, God, help us find and build up one another!”
I am heartened by my study of Jubileers throughout history, which leads me to believe that all it takes is a tiny minority within a minority to become the salt and light of a culture, to become the “little leaven that leavens the whole lump,” to become the tail that wags the dog, to become what I call “the three percenters”—the history-makers who bring about genuine hope and real change you can believe in. Even the dark side of history has been molded by three percenters of another stripe.
Has someone masquerading as an angel of light blinded your eyes into becoming an April Fool, or are you already (or do you desire to become) a part of the fiercely loyal minority known as Jubileers? To become the latter, I believe you must be willing to become fiercely proactive . . . now, today, this week, and most certainly starting within this month of April, 2010!
You must quickly make major life’s decisions that you have perhaps put off for weeks, months, or maybe even years now. There’s no more time for procrastination. That’s because from now on ignorance will no longer be bliss, and procrastination will no longer be just the thief of time; it will now become the thief of your family, your finances, and quite possibly, even your ministry or your very life!
To the blind all things are sudden!
America is about to be fundamentally transformed to a much greater degree than you may have imagined. Your worst enemy has been that arrogant, evil spirit who has spawned the all-American, twin mentalities—either “Things will always be as they have been” or “Things are so bad I think I’ll find some drug—like crack, porn, or a pre-mature Rapture doctrine—that lets me bail out!”
Perhaps by sifting through the “Jubilee” articles to follow, entitled, “Our National Jubilee’s Forgiveness Factors,” “Your Personal Jubilee’s Forgiveness Factors,” “Getting Psyched Up for Your Personal Year of Jubilee,” and “Crucial Steps into Your Personal Year of Jubilee,” you will find out if there’s still time for you to restructure and reposition yourself. To access the entire Jubilee series, see www.TheWalkShow.com, clicking on “Categories,” then “Your Jubilee in 2010” Series.
In my opinion, things have deteriorated to such a degree and on such an accelerated basis that nothing less than a “Year of Jubilee” in 2010 has the chance of saving, then prospering, most of us now. As we will see, your Jubilee and the nation’s Jubilee must always start first and foremost with forgiveness, which is the removal of all sorts of debts.
Pullin’ and Prayin’ with and for you,
Ken
Ken Talbott
Host, The Walk Show
1-877-WALK SHOW [1-877-925-5746--locally 253-333-1813]
Ken@TheWalkShow.com
