WE HAVE MOVED!

"And I beheld, and heard the voice of one eagle flying through the midst of heaven,
saying with a loud voice: Woe, woe, woe to the inhabitants of the earth....
[Apocalypse (Revelation) 8:13]

Sunday, September 10, 2017

Fr. Campbell, "Reading the Signs of The Times"

Reading the Signs of The Times



The prophets of ancient times were not very popular, because they saw the way the people were turning away from God and His Laws, and sometimes they had to be “prophets of doom”. Our Lord Himself disappointed many of His hearers when He said that they must choose between the love of God and the love of this world:

“You cannot serve God and mammon” (Mt.6:24b).


This explains why He was not very popular among the Jewish leadership of the time, who looked forward to establishing an earthly kingdom of Israel. They were very careful not to offend their Roman occupiers lest they lose what authority they still had.

And so we come to our own times, in which we find the world drifting far from God, contradicting His Commandments, and making up its own rules. The signs of the times, which Our Lord said we should read, indicate that we may be witnessing the Great Apostasy, the great falling away from the faith:

“And there will be signs in the sun and the moon and the stars, and upon the earth distress of nations bewildered by the roaring of the sea and the waves; men fainting for fear and expectation of the things that are coming on the world; for the powers of heaven will be shaken. And then they will see the Son of Man coming upon a cloud with great power and majesty” (Lk.11:25-27).

Those who stay close to God will be able to understand the significance of these signs, but the pagans and the fallen-away will not understand that the judgment of God is near. We who have already witnessed two catastrophic hurricanes in recent weeks should prepare ourselves for more disasters to come, because the Lord wants us to wake up and make ourselves ready for His coming:

“Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour” (Mt.25:13).

Why are these things happening? Because human society has become corrupt. The doom visited upon Sodom and Gomorrah was insignificant when compared with the enormity of present evils. The terrible crime of abortion is the legalized murder of the innocent. No government of this world has the authority to make laws which contradict the laws of God, in this case, “Thou shalt not kill” (Ex.20:13). The same applies to the legalization of gay and lesbian marriages. The minds of the public have been dulled by parades and rainbow flags, and even the rainbow colors projected upon the façade of the Whitehouse in Obama’s time.

How could we blame God for being angry? As Jesus said of the Pharisees:

“Hypocrites, well did Isaias prophesy of you, saying, ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; and in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrine the precepts of men’” (Mt.15:7-9).

The solar eclipse of this August 21st appears to have signaled the time of the “beginning of sorrows” spoken of by Our Lord. The eclipse was followed soon after by two great hurricanes, Harvey and Irma, the likes of which have seldom, if ever, been seen.

During or after World War II, the famous German mystic, Therese Neumann, was said to have told visiting American soldiers that the United States would be brought to its knees by a series of natural disasters, and that one disaster would scarcely be over before being followed by the next. Perhaps this is what we have witnessed in the case of the two great recent hurricanes, Harvey and Irma. We must continue to observe the signs of the times.

Our daily trials and struggles must tell us that we are on a journey that will lead to Heaven.  On this journey we cannot afford to be sidetracked or disabled by the pursuit of other goals that become ends in themselves rather than steppingstones to our ultimate goal. 

“No man can serve two masters,” says Our Lord, “for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will stand by the one and despise the other.  You cannot serve God and mammon” (Mt.6:24).

Our calling is to a life of holiness, which is described by St. Paul:

“The fruit of the spirit is: charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith, modesty, continency. Against such things there is no law. And they who belong to Christ have crucified their flesh with its passions and desires” (Gal.5:22-25).

On the other hand, St. Paul describes the works of the flesh:

“Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are immorality, uncleanness, licentiousness, idolatry, witchcrafts, enmities, contentions, jealousies, anger, quarrels, factions, parties, envies, murders, drunkenness, carousings, and suchlike. And concerning these I warn you, as I have warned you, that they who do such things will not attain the kingdom of God” (Gal.5:19-21).

Paul writes to Timothy:

“But thou, O man of God, flee these things; but pursue justice, godliness, faith, charity, patience, mildness.  Fight the good fight of faith, lay hold on the life eternal, to which thou hast been called… I charge thee in the sight of God, who gives life to all things, and in the sight of Christ Jesus, who bore witness before Pontius Pilate to the good confession, that thou keep the commandment without stain, blameless until the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1Tim.6:11,12a,13,14).