I have a ritual every morning. I wake up about an hour and a half before I have to be anywhere. I go downstairs, feed the cats, and make a pot of coffee. I go out to the sunroom (weather permitting) and sit down and reach for my Bible. I open to where I left off reading the day before. I have spent the last 30 years reading through the Scriptures over and over. After I read for a bit, I go in and make a cup of coffee and go back out and sit down with my tablet and check on some of my favorite YouTube videos. They usually center on financial analysis or conservative news feeds on current events. As I watch, I tend to look through the comments to get an idea of who might be watching and what they might have to say in regard to the person doing the video. From time to time, I see someone post a Bible verse or quote something from Scripture or make a comment about the current efforts to mandates policies by linking that with their belief that it’s the mark of the beast or something like that. But the other day, I came across a comment that I found rather shocking to say the least. The comment was, “The trouble with the world is all the people who believe in a sky god called Jesus. Wake up people!”.  The video was in reference to the reports of Evergrande, a major Chinese real estate development company being $300 billion dollars in debt and going under and the fact that this might trigger major financial catastrophes across the globe. I was a little stunned by the idea that the person making the comment felt that the financial chaos in the world was the fault of anyone who believes in Jesus. That maybe could have been dismissed as his opinion, except that he made a cry for people everywhere to wake up to his belief as fact. In effect, he was calling on people to not only push back, but to blame Christians for the chaos in the world today. Its stuff like this that can catch fire and take hold on society, especially a society as fractured as ours.

I guess its not enough that we have people who see the cracks in our financial system and the possible collapse of the dollar trying to talk to the financially uneducated only to be labeled as a conspiracy theorist. Its not enough to have people who have taken the vaccine get upset and almost radical with those who don’t want to take the vaccine. Its not enough to have a well-rounded education about history only to have those who are insistent that we have learned it all wrong and that they have the correct view of what happened in the past. Its not enough to have been raised to believe that working hard and saving money is the right and honorable thing to do only to watch stores, businesses, and restaurants close because no one wants to work. Now we have to sit and watch as crazy people out there are bent on blaming the world troubles on anyone who believes in Jesus. You can mark my words, it won’t be long before they will be calling for Christians to be removed from society. (Or at least, cut out of the system)

I suppose the scariest thing of all is that Hitler did the same thing in Nazi Germany. The entire country was drowning in inflation and things were really bad. Through his fiery speeches, he mesmerized an entire country into believing that the whole problem was the Jewish people. First, they were marked with a yellow star, then their stores and homes were ransacked and destroyed. Next, they were rounded up and taken by trains to….well, you know the rest. Now, this comment could have been just a single outburst of frustration by a non-believer, on the other hand, this could be the beginning of a dark road that will lead to the Tribulation and the almighty wrath of God poured out on a Christ-rejecting world…What do you think?