Europe & The Bible (07/31/2022)

My son, Ben, was going to teach the Sunday school lesson today. He's also one of our two tech guys.

He's ill, so he's not here. Dave Huber won't be back until the 11 o 'clock service because he flew out on a business trip.

So Dave Senior and I are the techies. And that explains why it's 10 .30

and we're just now starting. But part of an excuse would be this. When I was in Italy, someone broke in our rent car and stole

John Quinn and my backpacks, which had our laptops, our

Macs. All of our business for three companies were on those. Of course, you turn a

Mac off or they can't get it. So nobody got the information. But I had to come home and Colin had bought a new

Mac for me and loaded some of the stuff. And I spent all day yesterday loading other software on there.

Still don't have Logos on there, which is what I use for sermons, but I got it on my phone. So lost billfold, all our money, all our credit cards, driver's license, and the worst part, my gun license.

And passports were stolen. Luckily, that's all they got. I mean, it wasn't like our clothing or anything.

That was back because he and I flew to Sardinia to go to the Italian Air Force base there and left the girls back in Torino.

So we didn't have our suitcases in the car. We just had a day trip out there. But I mean, had everything except only thing we had was

John had a little small billfold in his pocket that wasn't in the car that had one credit card in it.

If we hadn't had that, we wouldn't be here today. We'd still be in Sardinia. What a trip.

So anyway, my laptop, this is brand new. It's not working right with our tech here at the church. So I apologize.

It wouldn't even let Zoom work for a while. I had to try to download Zoom. And then that didn't work. So I had to take some stuff off the computer.

It said it didn't have enough space, blah, blah, blah. So anyway, here we are. So since Ben couldn't be here to teach, what

I thought I would do is I would like to share something with you that I put together last night when

I figured out he wasn't going to be well enough to teach. And so let me share my screen.

Now, you guys that are here, local in Corset County, you will have to watch this through your phone because when

I tried to hook this up, only Ben knows how to do that too. Well, Dave knows how. Me and Dave Senior, we don't know how to hook up that TV.

I tried, and it made it where I couldn't see anything on my screen. But you can watch it online, and you'll see because I'm going to do some

PowerPoint here. Click the lock to make change. Here we go. I figured it out.

I'm getting techie, guys. OK. Yes, touchdown.

All right. OK. Marion's laughing. OK. So I, anyway, landed in Texas a couple, three days ago and kissed the ground to be back in the

USA. So what I want to do is, let's see if I can slide show.

That's not it. I've got one other thing

I've got to figure out. Slide show, play from current slide.

That shouldn't do it. OK. Can you see it, Morgan? Anybody in the house here see it?

OK. So does it say, OK, it's got a picture of the Coliseum. All right. Now, look at that verse.

What I want to do is take you through a little history of the Bible, but not so much that this morning, but my trips to Europe in the last several years and the changes that I have seen, which are alarming from the human viewpoint.

But from the divine viewpoint, they're right on time. So they're exciting from a Bible viewpoint.

Now, look at Revelation 17 .9. The seven heads are seven mountains on which the woman sit at.

That's Rome. It was written 2 ,000 years ago by the apostle

John. And he prophesied that a lot of the end times, tribulation period, is going to be centered around the ancient

Roman Empire and Rome herself. And that photo I took with my own, what

I call, my family laughs at me. I call it my big old camera, because it's a lot bigger than this one.

And I like it better. But that's some history looking at you right there.

But I want you to think about what that shows. It shows a destroyed empire.

That's what that is. That is a fallen empire. And yet, the word of God prophesies that that empire shall rise again with a new leader named the

Antichrist. And the last 3 and 1 half years of that will be the worst tribulation that the

Earth has ever seen. This is funny. I had this open to send

Marion a text. And it's typed the entire message so far in there,

Marion. I'll send it to you. That'll be funny. Now you got some of it in print.

OK. So it's fascinating to walk there, actually, from the viewpoint of seeing.

I mean, we walked past this again. You just can't. It's just magnificent to see this. Even my big camera can't capture the enormous size of this

Colosseum, which was built for human slaves to have hand -to -hand combat to the death to simply provide some sports for the people of Rome to keep them settled down so the emperor of Rome could have peace, as you know.

Well, that particular emperor of Rome is going to be nothing compared to the one that's coming.

Now I want to take you back a little bit through some time here. 2016,

Charlotte and I took a trip. This was not a business trip. This one wasn't. The next two are. But we flew into London.

And look at the picture of that beautiful old Church of England church building on the left.

And the one on the right, I am honestly not sure what that is. But it looks a little ornate even for Church of England.

So it might not even be a church. I don't even know what that is. It's probably might have been a little bit later built,

Church of England. But church. But the thing is, the

Church of England pretty much became apostate later on. It was a Protestant church.

But it kind of went the wrong way, just like every church group cycles from godliness and Jesus being the first love and God being sovereign all the way around to humanism and Arminianism, where man is in control of everything.

And that church long since did this. And just before World War II, you could go into these amazing old cathedrals and find six or eight people in there.

And that's true today too. But I mean, they had the greatest preacher that lived since the time of Paul was

Charles Spurgeon, was from London. And eventually, they rejected that light. And they ended up in World War II.

And they were the empire upon whom the sun never set. And now they're just a small little country over in Europe.

So you see, God does judge nations. And I know my son Ben's been teaching in Sunday school what he thinks is a far prophecy that at least pertains in part to the

United States. We better watch what we're doing because God will not favor America over England or over Israel.

He's punished both of those nations for falling away from him. So that's Charlotte now on this trip back in 2016 in Venice.

What a beautiful place in Italy. Look at that. And a lot of this goes back to the Renaissance period, which was an amazing time.

And now this is Florence, which a lot of the Renaissance is found in Florence, where you had the

Protestant Reformation happening at the same time, science and architecture and art had this amazing

Renaissance. You can look at the oil paintings of people prior to the

Renaissance, and they didn't even know how to make it look like their feet were on the ground. They looked like they were on their tiptoes.

They couldn't make it happen. And when the Renaissance happened, it's like God put a spark down on the

Earth through certain individuals that he inspired to be able to do things that could never be done before.

And so now you can look at the pictures. Their feet are well -planted on the Earth. The artists gained such skills.

So did science. So did architecture and everything. And so then in 2018, we went on an

Exos Aerospace business trip back to Rome. Took that with my big old camera.

I like that particular picture and that. That's one you previously saw. Now, this is interesting because this is on the inside of that huge Colosseum.

And these are the actual places where they kept some of the animals and the slaves that were used to be engaged in warfare and slaughter in front of the masses.

And there you can see it very well on the inside. This was the slave quarters and the system that they had to run.

And this would have been under the ground floor, which would have had the dirt on it where they fought and shed their blood.

And many Christians died here, were fed the lions and so forth later on. But this was actually under the floor in what was a basement where they kept the animals and the humans that were treated like animals.

This is supposedly Renaissance view of what Moses looks like in Italy. Now, notice he has horns on his head.

You see that? Who can explain why Moses has horns? And then this is a walk through Rome where you can see the destruction of the ancient empire in the back, back there in the foreground on the picture on the right.

What's interesting, and there's an ancient aqueduct where they had running water in this civilization.

Now, this shifts over. Remember I said this, the Bible says this is the city of seven hills and the city on seven hills.

And this is the highest hill. And this is part of the area where the emperor himself lived.

He could come out and walk on this area and see all the way to the

Colosseum. In fact, if you look on the far right hand corner, top corner of that photo, you'll see the

Colosseum way in the background underneath those trees. And you can also see part of the living quarters of this massive amount of buildings for the emperor.

Now you can see even better to the Colosseum sort of in the middle of the picture, way in the background.

In this, and we're standing in the area where the emperor of Rome lived on the top of the highest of the seven hills.

Now that's me and Charlotte at an area looking at the archeology and some of the ancient leftovers of a destroyed civilization.

There's a kid just out on the street in Rome, he's just walking around down the street and looking, here's the Colosseum. It is magnificent to see.

More of the ruins of a fallen empire. Now this is done later in time or more recent in our time,

I should say, from our viewpoint. And notice how it depicts the victories of Rome in the past in this magnificent building.

At the top, you can see these kinds of things where it shows people in hand -to -hand combat and heroes of the

Roman Empire fighting and winning. This is what this looks like at night. It's really quite astounding. In Rome, it's such that you don't drive, you just walk everywhere and it's amazing.

That's why you can eat all the pasta and the gelato you want, come back and you've only gained maybe four pounds, not bad, because you walk everywhere.

And then you go into the Renaissance period, starts to picture Christianity, but it pictures it from a very unbiblical viewpoint.

And yet it is beautiful art. And I'm glad that the Roman Catholic Church preserved all this art, although they get the biblical side of it incorrect so many times, but it's just beautiful, beautiful art.

And in the center towards the right is the Virgin Mary. And there in the upper left, you can see the

Virgin Mary with the baby Jesus. And they're all about that, but they also love to depict

Jesus as if he's still dead. You see there at the bottom, that's actually stone that's been crafted into looking like the body of Jesus lying there dead in a crypt.

And up in the top above that is Jesus with the Mother Mary and the Roman Catholics like to depict that.

Now, this is the best part of Italy. It's called gelato, it's the best ice cream in the world. And so I think the

Lord created Italy for this purpose. Now, this is a trip later in 2019.

This is Florence, one of the most beautiful cities in the world with so much of the

Renaissance art, paintings, statues, and things like that. And now this is back then in 2019, we were on an exoceros space trip and we had planned to do business in Southern Italy and build and launch rockets there.

A lot of it was to help their economy. They didn't have any jobs, but they had a lot of rocket scientists from the universities know where to work.

And the people had been laid off and the factory shut down and they were going to bring us there and give us grants and low interest loans to bring our business there.

And we had it all worked out. And this is what some of the countryside looked like on a driving trip out towards this area to meet with this businessman.

Look how beautiful that is in the Southern Italy. Now, this is actually in the foreground is actually the land we were going to purchase to put our exoceros based factory right there.

Look what the background would look like behind that. And we were going to build a couple of apartments in there in the factory to stay free when we had to go on a business trip to Italy.

Staying free in Italy would be a nice thing. All right, so there's some of the businessmen. You can see me on the left and John Quinn on the right meeting with that gentleman in the middle who was a really well -dressed

Italian business multimillionaire, perhaps a billionaire. And a lot of the businessmen in that area had put up a lot of the money that was going to be used for the grants to bring us there.

And there we are signing agreements with them. Everything's worked out. This was, now what's interesting about it, when

COVID hit, all of these businessmen and all the businesses in Italy were just shut down.

You couldn't even leave your house and they were going out of business. And the mafia came in in the

South in particular and told these businessmen, we'll bail you out. And they took the money, so now guess who owns them?

So that's where the money for our project went in the South. The mafia got it and distributed it wherever they wanted it but they did not want an

American company to get it. So that ended many into a couple of years of work we had done.

It didn't really end it because while we were down here, there were Italians in the Northern part of Italy where most of the businesses and the money is.

And they were wanting us to bring it there. And they had been trying to get us to bring it there the whole time.

So what we've done since this happened, we've shifted. And that's why this particular trip we were in Turin, which is also called

Torino, which is where the Winter Olympics were a few years back. But it's where Ferraris are built and all these factories with all this machine work and all the skillsets are there.

We can actually use part of their factories and some of their skillset to help us build rockets. So now we've relocated this project to Northern Italy.

Well, back in 2019, on the trip back from the South, we went through, I don't remember how to say it.

Napoli is how you say it in Italian. I guess that'll work. But if you look in the background, way back there, you see a mountain that looks like it has two tops.

That's Mount Vesuvius. It's not really two tops. That's the crater that blew off and destroyed

Pompeii thousands of years ago. And it's a beautiful city.

I was driving a car through there and so was John. Worst place to drive you ever saw. There's not as much room as this would hold this pulpit and you got to drive your car through there while other

Italians are doing it. So now this brings us to this recent trip we were just on. And the main reason we went was to go to Sardinia, the island of Sardinia, which

Italy owns, and they have an Air Force base there. And this is the base. There's the front gate. And we were visiting with Italian Air Force to work together to launch our rockets, and especially our hypersonic rocket, which we just built, which they're very interested in, from this particular island.

And this is actually classified, so don't put this on Facebook.

And I honestly did not know it was classified when I took the picture. And it's not a clear picture of the stuff.

So I don't think they care, but I wouldn't post this one anywhere. But over on the far right, where you see the white looking area where the grass is kind of dead, there's a couple of facilities in there where rockets can be assembled and built.

And on the far left, where you see a little isthmus sticking out into the water, there's the launch pad is right way over there.

I didn't get a close picture of it, and it's probably good that I didn't. But that's where we went to visit.

And on our way home, we stopped over near that beautiful water and just got maybe 30 yards from the car to take one picture.

And while we did that watching the car, they busted the back, bad English, sorry, good

Texan. They busted the back window out, grabbed both our backpacks, jumped in a white car and left before we could get, we were watching when it happened.

And we know not to leave stuff in the car, but we thought watching it, we could be all right, man.

End of a perfect day ended that way. And then it was really interesting trying to deal with the police, get a police report, get them to let us get on the plane to fly to the mainland without a passport, without a driver's license, with no

ID whatsoever. Very interesting that the Lord took care of us. This is the very top point of the

Air Force Base. And so that was a great trip and very successful.

Here we are meeting John on the left, me in the middle. And the Colonel, the head of the

Air Force Base in the uniform there and his driver on the far right. And he just practically begging us to come there.

We really had, we clicked with this gentleman and John knows the general of the

Air Force that he works for and he wants us to come too. So it was very successful. So now we're back to Torino where the business would be done there.

There we are after the business was over last couple of days. We drove out on the way back to Rome where we had to fly back to Texas.

We drove through what they call the wine country and we were eating out right here. And look at our view.

That's the view we had. And it's just beautiful. The wine country, I'd never been through there really and paid attention, but it's one of the most beautiful places on the earth.

They've been terracing this land for millennia. And on the top of almost every hill is a city like Ronald Reagan talked about in his speech, the city on a hill.

That's what he wanted America to be. And he got that from this. This is where he got the idea. This is what the land looks like.

It's just full of this. You can see where everything's terraced and they grow figs.

They grow tons of olives and everywhere you go are vineyards.

It's just beautiful. They even have golf courses there. I got to actually play on one.

You can see the green down there in the middle. Probably the prettiest golf course I've ever seen in the world. And from there, you can look up, you see another little old castle up on the hill.

All right, so here's kind of what I wanted to share with you about this trip. So we looked at Rome, you know, three years ago, five years ago.

And if you guys remember, this is Rome now. I took this picture just the other day. We didn't eat at that particular restaurant, but it just, it's a pretty picture.

And you can just see kind of what some of the streets of Rome look like. That's like a restaurant or two on every block and you can't find a bathroom there.

So it's a miracle that I only gained four pounds. Then I've already lost it.

We got back Wednesday. By Saturday, I had it off, praise God. But it was worth it because it was spaghetti and pizza and gelato and stuff like that.

But here's what I think you remember me saying a few years back after I got back from one of these trips that when we went into Switzerland, which is a former

Protestant nation, of course, Italy is Catholic, but Switzerland, all of the

Protestant nations in Europe as far as I know now have been turned secular by their government schools.

So they've taken God and Jesus Christ out and some John Calvin was from that part of the world.

And you just can't imagine Martin Luther from Germany. You just can't imagine that all that's gone now.

The richest Christianity in the history of the world was in those parts, they're secular now.

So when you see the kids, college kids, high school kids walking down the street and you look in their eyes, they're walking dead people.

Remember me telling you the story? And I said, but in Italy, they still have a Bible. Even though it's

Roman Catholic, they got a Bible. They go to Christian schools. They keep the girls and the guys separate in high school, which helps them not get in trouble.

And so when you look in their eyes, they actually look happy. They look alive. And that's what

I said five years ago and three years ago. And I hate to report, I can't say it now, it's changed.

One of the things that was amazingly different in Switzerland every building, the beautiful buildings of Switzerland had graffiti all over them.

Italy had none of it. And I made the joke, if some of you guys were here, remember I said, it's probably because the Pope is there, he'll have them killed if they, well, now everywhere you look in Rome and all over Italy is graffiti.

I mean, destroy in the buildings, just horrible looking, satanic looking stuff everywhere.

And that's in Italy now also, and also the kids don't look so lively anymore.

They don't look so full of life as they did. Come on in, we're running a little over time because we had some tech issues getting started on Sunday school.

I wish I had these pictures up on the screen where you can see them. I just got back from a business trip to Italy, and I'm talking about some of the changes in Europe since I was there three years ago and five years ago, and they aren't changes for the better, they're changes for the worse.

So now you look at Switzerland. Oh, if you have a phone, you can log on, you can, it's just about over though, don't worry about it.

You can log on and see these pictures. I think we are recording it though. So you'll be able to go back and see it.

But this was Switzerland back in 2016, and it would look like this everywhere.

I wish you guys could see it. It's just the buildings are just destroyed by graffiti. All right, but in Italy back then there was none because in my point that I made when

I came back from that trip was, I know that they're Roman Catholic, but at least they have a Bible. Whereas the former

Protestant nations like Switzerland had been secularized by the government schools and they no longer have, they're not

Christian anymore. They're pagan, they're secular. And the graffiti was everywhere. And I said, but in Italy, at least they have a

Bible and the kids are kept separate in boy schools and girls schools and high schools. So they're more pure.

And when you look at the kids eyes in Italy back five years ago, they look pure and happy. Whereas in Switzerland they look like walking dead people.

And now what I hate to say is now Italy looks like this. So if you guys can see, this is

Italy. It's just graffiti everywhere. The young people have gotten tired of the strictness of the

Roman Catholic church. And now they have a Pope that's a poke. I said poke, maybe

I should have said it that way. A Pope that's liberal even by their standards, even by our standards.

And so they've pulled all their kids out of the, I don't, you never say all, but a lot of the kids out of the

Catholic schools and they're going to government schools in Italy. And now they look the same as the Swiss kids did five years ago and three years ago.

They look like walking dead people. I mean, the young girls, high school and college age that used to be modest, now they literally have like a, what looks like a bra on with their midsection showing and a little skirt that's this, that's all the whole skirt walking all over Rome like that.

So now they've gone the way of all of Europe, right? So even the trains,

I've got a picture of a train there with graffiti all over the side of the train. I can't even stop it. It's just, it's just amazing.

So my point is that in the book of Revelation chapter 17, verse nine, it says, let me move this picture where I can see it.

It says, and the angel said unto me, wherefore didst thou marvel? I will tell thee the mystery of the woman and of the beast that carrieth her, which has seven heads and 10 horns.

The beast that thou saw and was pit and go into perdition, that means hell.

So this is talking about the Antichrist who existed as a human in the past and then was not, which means he was killed.

And then he is again, which means he is revived and born and lives on the earth and is indwelt by Satan.

And it says he will ascend out of the bottomless pit and go into hell later. Out in the future, he'll be sent back to hell.

They that dwell on the earth shall wonder at it. Those whose names are not written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that was and is and yet, and was not and yet is.

And then the verse right after it says the seven heads are seven mountains on which the woman sitted.

Rome is known as the city of seven hills. It's a reference to Rome. And so it was very interesting being there on a business trip, walking on the ancient, seeing the ancient part of Rome, which has already been destroyed, realizing the

Roman empire will be revived again and the Antichrist will actually rule from there for a while and then he'll move to Jerusalem three and a half years into it, somewhere in that time period.

And he will offer a pig on the new Jewish temple that they will build probably in our near future.

And the second three and a half years after that will be the worst tribulation the earth has ever seen. So we got to end

Sunday school. We usually start church in five minutes, six minutes. So I'm gonna get out of here, but thanks. We'll see you in just a little bit.