‘It’s no accident we are witnessing the beginnings of persecution’
Jonathan Cahn, the Bible teacher and author who started warning nine years ago that America was facing the judgment of God if it did not reject secularism and return to its Judeo-Christian roots, says the June 26 Supreme Court ruling that legalized gay marriage in all 50 states marks the formal end to Christian America.
Barring a “miracle of God,” the die has been cast, said the author of “The Harbinger” and “The Mystery of the Shemitah.”
Cahn, speaking at the annual Messiah Conference at Messiah College in Pennsylvania on America’s Independence Day, said the U.S. and the world are undergoing “tectonic shifts” in terms of attitudes and beliefs.
Even those who consider themselves “Christian” will continue to stray from right doctrine, he said, choosing instead to blend in with the ways of Western culture.
He said the world has entered what the apostle Paul called the “falling away” or the apostasy. This period, which marks the beginning of the “end of the age” and the soon return of Jesus Christ, will be similar to the period at the beginning of the age, when pagan Rome viciously persecuted the followers of Jesus.
But just as the early Church in the Book of Acts was marked by its “dynamic, revolutionary, counter-culture faith,” the last-days remnant that refuses to conform to the decaying moral structure of modern culture will also be marked by these same dynamic characteristics.
“At the beginning it was a revolutionary, radical, underground, counter-culture and Jewish faith. It was for all people but Jewish. As it moved away (from Jerusalem) the Jewish leadership vanished. And the more this faith became imbedded in Western culture, in world culture, the more this faith lost its identity,” he said.
After the apostles and the early Church fathers died and the Church got cut off from its Jewish roots, it lost something, said Cahn, who was speaking to about 1,000 Messianic Jewish and gentile believers at the annual conference of the Messianic Jewish Association of America. This year’s conference was also celebrating the 100th anniversary of organized Messianic Judaism, a movement of Jewish believers who came to faith in Jesus, or Yeshua, as their Messiah in 1915.
Two “Christianities?”
In the last days Christianity will continue to break into two, said Cahn. There will be the apostate false church and that which remains true to the Gospel and a biblical worldview. The true Church will boldly speak the truth on moral issues, as well as embrace Israel and support the Jewish people at a time when the rest of the world sees Israel as the enemy.
“At the beginning of the age you had an anti-Christian pagan culture that persecuted believers, well it’s coming back,” he explained. “We are at a pivotal point.”
This new period of total lawlessness and apostasy in which whole Christian denominations are falling in line with the world’s changing view of marriage, is only the latest symptom that the world and the Church are racing in different directions.
“We are watching changes of tectonic significance. Two years ago, speaking at this conference, I said the ground is shifting beneath our feet. Now I say it has shifted. If ever there was a moment that has marked America’s and much of the Western civilized world’s departure, of a post-Christian America, that definitive marker has come,” Cahn said. “It came just two days before this conference began. It happened on June 26, 2015, when the judgment of the nation’s highest court struck down the word of God concerning marriage.”
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Prepare for persecution
And the court’s decision will reverberate well beyond the marriage altar, Cahn said.
“The voice of the prophets, they cry out and say, ‘Woe to those that call good evil and evil good.’ Every step this culture takes to celebrate sin, is matched by an equal step to vilify and persecute those who are of God,” he said. “It’s no accident we are witnessing the beginnings of persecution.”
That warning was made even more significant because of who it came from, Cahn said.
“The warnings that believers will be persecuted didn’t come this time from students of biblical prophecy but from every single one of the dissenting Supreme Court justices,” he said. “They each sounded an alarm in that ruling — that believers will be persecuted. You don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. It’s no accident this event is being noted as a harbinger. The end of Christian America.”
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‘God is not mocked’
Cahn said he warned for several years that American Christians were watching a civilization approaching judgment.
“In ‘The Harbinger‘ I warned of the nine harbingers of judgment that appeared in Israel’s last days that are appearing now,” he said. “The signs have not stopped since the book came out. They’ve continued. One year ago one of those nine signs of America was destroyed on a Jewish holy day (of Passover), and on the night of its destruction the moon turned red.”
He was referring to the “Tree of Hope,” a cedar tree that was planted near Ground Zero of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center towers, in place of a sycamore that had been destroyed by the falling debris. The cedar withered and died, and was removed on Passover of 2014. The cedar is a symbol of a nation’s strength in Old Testament Bible prophesy.
“Another of the nine harbingers, the president went down to ground zero (in 2012) and ascribed words on its highest beam that described words of judgment that led to the destruction of ancient northern Israel,” Cahn said.
Without knowing that he was repeating the prideful vow of ancient Israel as recorded by the prophet Isaiah in Isaiah 9:10, Obama wrote on the steel girder of the rebuilt tower: “We remember. We rebuild. We come back stronger.”
“This past weekend, the top of that tower right above those words (of the president) was also bathed in rainbow. A Tower of defiance,” Cahn said. “God is long-suffering and merciful, but God is not mocked.”
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“We cannot put God in a box. If we do He gets out. It could be very uneventful. I don’t want people focusing on dates but on being right with God.”
Full article: Jonathan Cahn: ‘End of Christian America’ is here (WND)
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