“Slay them wherever you find them…Idolatry is worse than carnage…Fight against them until idolatry is no more and God’s religion reigns supreme.” (Surah 2:190-)

“Believers, do not make friends with any but your own people…They desire nothing but your ruin….You believe in the entire Book…When they meet you they say: ‘We, too, are believers.’ But when alone, they bite their finger-tips with rage.” (Surah 3:118, 119)

“Forbidden to you are…married women, except those you own as slaves.” (Surah 4:20-, 24-)

“Believers, take neither Jews nor Christians for your friends.” (Surah 5:51)

“Fight against such as those to whom the Scriptures were given [Jews and Christians]…until they pay tribute out of hand and are utterly subdued.” (Surah 9:27-)

“Believers, make war on the infidels who dwell around you. Deal firmly with them.” (Surah 9:121-)

Mohammed said, “I have been ordered to fight with the people till they say, none has the right to be worshiped but Allah”. (Al Bukhari vol. 4:196)

As with the word of the living God, it is possible to take things out of context and make the appear to be something they are not. I do not believe that these quotes misrepresent the intent of the original writer, however I would add two caveats. The first being that these are not the entire counsel of the Islamic holy book. The second is that, just as with the Church, there can be emphasis on one aspect of the entire teaching over another.

An example of this would be that some bodies have a heavy emphasis on God’s grace while others would emphasize God’s holiness. The truth is that a comprehensive view of our Creator is one that recognizes both grace and holiness to achieve a complete picture.

Some mosques have a clear jihadist bent and others appear to actually be the religion of peace that they claim to be. The peaceful coexistent image of Islam is based on the portions of their book that instruct them to live at peace with each other. They are instructed to live at peace with the rest of the world only until their numbers and influence increase to the point where it can be bent into submission to their distant and uninvolved god.

They have a works based system where they attempt to stay on the good side of Allah. The faith based mindset of most Christians permits many of us to be less concerned with pleasing a God who is infinitely forgiving. The concept of forgiveness is correct, but, unfortunately, we don’t dedicate as much of our effort to pleasing Him. This is not done to earn our place in eternity, but out of gratitude… but sometimes, we don’t really seem that grateful.

Unfortunately for us, and for them: they are wrong. Government officials say we are unpatriotic for not supporting their efforts. The reality is that it would just compound the foolishness if we got behind programs that we know will not be effective. Real patriotism involves working to take our country in the right direction. We are told it is just politics that leads to citizen resistance… but, it is just common sense.

As with much in this world, those of us who depend on the national government to fix our problems will be sadly disappointed. As individuals, is there anything we can do to help restore the nation that was the arsenal of democracy during the second world war? Our government and the multi-national corporations have led us down the free trade path that gave us some lower prices, but at the cost of good paying jobs disappearing and miraculously reappearing in some third world sweat shop. Corporate profits rose and American workers income went down.

Those of us who were caught up in our consumer driven society were only too happy buy more and more goodies at discount prices. Considering the self absorbed nature of the “me” society, it is not surprising that we sacrifice our neighbors and our economy so we can afford to buy more stuff.

Over a period of time our penchant for buying cheaper products and corporate focus on profits at any price led to a migration of American jobs to other parts of the world. This whole process took place under the approving eye of our free trade leaders from both parties. We have come to the point where it has become harder and harder to even find products made by American hands. We have been maneuvered into a position where we have little or no choice but to buy imported goods.

However, for those weary of scouring your local malls in vain for domestic products, there is something you can do. That is something beyond complaining to the store manager. While it may make you feel better, there is usually little they can do about the purchasing decisions imposed from above.

In response to this evaporation of American products from the shelves of American retailers, some enterprising entrepreneurs have developed web sites that bring together the remaining locally produced products. Buying this way will be a little more inconvenient. It will be a little more expensive. However, consider it an investment in building a stronger country, a country that can, once again, be proud of what it makes and exports throughout the world.

You can find many of them by Googling “American made products”. Some of include:

http://www.proudamericantradingpost.com/
http://americansworking.com/
http://www.madeinusa.org/

There are many more. It is worth checking out several to find the ones(s) that have what you want and that you are most comfortable working with. There are even some higher profile efforts like the one Glenn Beck recently launched http://www.1791.com. The products, while not cheap, are made largely by single mothers in need of employment.

You may even want to keep looking as you go about your normal shopping patterns. During a recent visit to a firearms shop, I was looking at two nearly identical weapons. One was made in Arizona and one in Brazil. The domestic product was a few dollars more, but the satisfaction of buying a product put together by American workers was well worth it.

I know times are tough, and many families need to make every penny count, but we need to take a little longer view of our economy and, as much as possible, pass up short term benefits for the longer term value of a strong and prosperous country. This is something we can do and not even Barack Hussein Obama can stop us.

It seems that the only places the Democrats and some Republicans can come up with to save money is in areas they know the people will reject. It is not only dishonest, which is not surprise nowadays for members of the political class, but this approach also insures our country will never see any progress in returning fiscal.

I would like to suggest to both parties that there are far more productive paths that can be followed to more economical government. They are never suggested because the inside the beltway crowd knows that the people will embrace the cuts and a part of the gravy train will end for the connected class.

What are some of these paths? Let’s look at several, that like five hundred lawyers at the bottom of the ocean, would be a good start.

We could begin by looking at many of the foreign aid programs the state department loves as a way to buy us some friends. It doesn’t seem to be working. Our foreign aid has been described as a transfer of money from the poor people of America to the rich dictators around the world. Beyond this, it is just one more form of corporate welfare as often a large percentage of the funds need to spent in the US with US companies… often military suppliers.

Considering schemes like Obama’s plan to give tanks to the new Egyptian government run by the Muslim Brotherhood, we see policies that make Fast and Furious look like child’s play. Do we really want to arm the people that hate everything about us but our President? And they really aren’t sure about him.

Next, we might want to reconsider all the funds that are going to programs benefiting illegal aliens. The liberal progressives tell us they are here… we have to do something to help them. What they fail to understand that the more they give away, the more people come here and line up for their share. It is not compassionate to keep people subsisting on taxpayer dollars when they could be productive citizens in their home land. People that have the initiative to leave the land of their birth and go to another place of perceived opportunity are the the kind of people that can make their own countries a better place.

We could even look at all the new federal employees hired to stick their progressive noses into our business and personal lives… we might even reconsider some of the old ones too. The thing this administration does not understand, or does not care about, is that bureaucrats, like so many of these new employees, care more about processes than about results. They see no problem with holding up needed projects because not all the Is have been dotted and Ts crossed on the unnecessary paperwork.

Mike Huckabee explains why some projects seem to be delayed indefinitely by the saying, “everything has been done that is necessary, but it has not been done by everybody”. Lightening the federal payroll would not only lighten the budget, but would diminish the ability of these people to stifle job growth and destroy our freedom.

For that matter, we could even look at congressional pay and perks. It wouldn’t be much compared to the magnitude of the problem, but it would be a great symbolic first step, and liberal progressives are big on symbolism since their ideas hardly ever really work. This could be followed by cutting out Mrs. Obama’s extravagant vacations.

There are many more areas that money could be saved, but they, along with those mentioned, would be anathema to the regime. Smaller, less intrusive government would save money, but that is obviously not the goal of the people making decisions. Sooner or later, we need to impose our will on the people in Washington, or they will impose their will on us. It’s our choice.

Europe and, to a lesser extent the United States, have voluntarily disavowed God and faded into the dark night of hellish alienation.

Liberal-progressivism’s pursuit of one-world, Godless socialistic government inescapably reduces every person to soulless equality with no meaning apart from the will of the political state.  In this Brave New World, history and tradition are thrust aside.  Clinging to standards of culture and morality become anti-social crimes.

As I wrote earlier:

Europeans, before the evolution of strong nation states in the 16th century, thought of themselves as inhabitants of Christendom.  It is thus accurate to assert that everything that we know as western civilization is an exclusive product of Christianity emanating from the church at Rome.

What went wrong?

The short answer is the French Revolution of 1789.

That cataclysmic event destroyed Christian civilization and instituted the secular, materialistic religion of socialism, first in France, then throughout Europe.

In the simplest terms, French philosophers of the ill-named Continental European Enlightenment (the 18th century) decapitated Western civilization.  The human soul and conscience, moral codes, and the relationship of each individual human to the universe and his fellow humans were tossed into the trash heap.  The Western world was figuratively reduced to a headless body that reacted blindly to external, physical stimulae.

The secular, atheistic religion of socialism (in the United States, liberal-progressivism) ignores peoples’ spiritual needs.  It asserts, instead, that only material needs for water, food, clothing shelter, and sex count in political society.  In socialist religious theory, all of these things can be administered by the secular political state in ways that permit state planners to manipulate and control every aspect of human social behavior.

No one can logically accept that liberal-socialist doctrine and simultaneously support the metaphysical, natural-law principles that were the basis of our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution, Jefferson’s inalienable human rights flowing from our Creator God.

Philosophical materialism implies that the human soul is a myth; there is only the physical tangle of nerves, muscle, and bones constituting the physical human body.  Non-material qualities like personal responsibility, piety, patriotism, and morality are dismissed as value judgments, lost in the morass of moral relativism.  Karl Marx, for example, sneered at religion as the opium of the masses, calling it a fiction created by the ruling class to stupefy and subjugate the workers.

Dismissing the Mind of God and the natural law that flowed from it, intellectuals of the French Revolution believed themselves capable of manipulating humans, in the mass, as if they were puppets.  They expected their secular religion of socialism to bring harmony and perfection to human life.

Instead, they took the Western world back to the lawless days of the hordes of Genghis Khan, when the sword was the only source of order and right.  The millions of dead and maimed in two World Wars and the murders of tens of millions by the French Revolutionary councils, Napoleon, Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Mao, and Castro are the legacy of French socialistic materialism and secularity.

Europe, once the driving force in world culture, has become a hollow shell that the inflow of Muslim immigrants will crack and overwhelm in coming decades, unless Christian missionaries succeed in bringing Europeans back to Jesus Christ.

This article originally appeared in The View From 1776 blog.

I have no special revelation from God, a la Harold Camping, but with all the death and destruction brought to us courtesy of natural disasters, it’s hard not to believe we are seeing a pattern. The true believers in the warmer brigade will try to tell us that it is our fault for driving cars we can fit in with sufficient power to get out of their own way and wanting to keep our homes warm in the winter and cool in the summer. However, pretty much all their best arguments have been debunked by honest scientists willing to go against the flow of political correctness.

Any serious student of biblical prophesy understands that the end times show us the human toll of these tragedies. As I write this, reports are just coming in of four more lives snuffed out by tornadoes in Oklahoma with severe weather bearing down on the stricken Joplin, Missouri.

While people around the world have experienced their share of weather related disasters, the current focus seems to be on middle America. People are dying. Homes and businesses are being destroyed and there is nothing our government, which fancies itself in control of all things, can do about it. Or is there?

Many who have swallowed the global warming fantasy will scoff at a relationship between our leaders policies and the safety and prosperity of our people. However, God told Abraham, the father of the Jewish nation, “I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” (Genesis 12:3 NIV) Furthermore, Psalm 122:6 tells us. “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: May those who love you be secure.” (NIV) Other translations tell us we would be prosperous. At this point in time, we are neither secure nor prosperous.

It is true that our current leaders are taking all sorts of actions that will bring harm to our country, most will result in economic loss or reduction in our freedom. Few are as direct an affront to our creator and protector of the Jewish nation as supporting and forming alliances with those who would wipe Israel from the map. Looking back through history, things never went well for those who sided against God’s chosen people… even though they appeared to succeed for some time. It would not be to our benefit to be numbered among those fallen nations.

Congresswoman Michele Bachmann understands this. In addressing a Republican Jewish Coalition, she remarked, “I am convinced in my heart and in my mind that if the United States fails to stand with Israel, that is the end of the United States . . . [W]e have to show that we are inextricably entwined, that as a nation we have been blessed because of our relationship with Israel, and if we reject Israel, then there is a curse that comes into play.” She has taken all kinds of heat from the sort of people the apostle Paul wrote about in Romans, “Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools.” (v 1:22 NIV)

Our country’s president is leading us down the road to destruction, in general policies and, specifically, with regard to Israel. They, like the leaders of the Third Reich, feel more comfortable with the Islamic enemies of the Jewish people. They attempt, at every turn, to guide the nation of Israel down the path where its existence could be called into question.

Why then are the average folks subject to these terrible losses while the president hobnobs with royalty and government representatives sipping champaign or guzzling Guinness in Europe? For the answer we need to look at who, ultimately, is responsible to fix this situation.

While he is running amok and doing is best to “fundamentally change” our country away from one based on hard work, common sense and Judeo-Christian values, it is really up to us. Barack Obama is incapable of correcting all the wrongs he and his cohorts have visited upon our country.

II Chronicles 7:14 says, “if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.” It doesn’t say, “when the leaders get their heads on straight, then things will be fixed. No! It says “God’s people are responsible for setting things straight.

We need to be about our fathers business. Obama cannot get us out of this mess. All he can do is dig it deeper. We need to follow the instructions in 2nd Chronicles… then be open to the tasks God lays before us as we work to restore this land of freedom he gave to us. And among those things, I’m certain, will be to bring back a rightful understanding of Israel’s place in the world.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is standing at such a crossroads. He could follow the desires of most of the world and allow the enemies of his country to possess land that was given to his ancestors and promised to succeeding generations, or he could do the right thing. The left in this country and his own are saying all manner of evil about him. They are plotting his political demise… although the people of his homeland believe otherwise.

He understands the principle that doing the right thing is more important than being popular.

Yet this thinking is nothing new. Many years ago, during one of the children of Israel’s detours into the land of idolatry, Joshua called the people together, reviewed their history and chastised them for the error of their ways. He included in his exhortation to righteousness, the following words:

But if serving the LORD seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD. (Joshua 24:15 NIV)

Joshua was willing to stand alone if he had to. Fortunately, he didn’t need to go alone as the people heeded his words and told him, “We will serve the LORD”. The question of whether or not they would have seen the light without his dedication is probably the point of the Biblical account. If his declaration was not important, it would not have been included.

More recently, in our own country’s history Patrick Henry turned the tide of timid fellow Virginians with his impassioned plea for their support of the New Englanders who had been attacked by the British.

Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace, but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? 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!

Not everyone was convinced, but his passion was sufficient to carry the day and the Virginians were prepared when the struggle for liberty turned south. Would the history of the United States be the same without the single minded leadership of Henry and the other men who risked their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor in the quest for freedom. It is doubtful, but thankfully we don’t have to wonder since the victory was won.

Does this mean that this only applies to big decisions or life and death situations like the Chinese man facing down the government’s tanks in Tienanman Square in 1989. Not really. If you don’t strengthen your moral muscles in the small decisions, there is hardly any way you can handle the big ones.

These decisions can involve honesty in the workplace, standing for the truth in academia, or just not buying arguments like “everybody does it”. The choice is yours and the choice is mine. I hope none of us every have to face down the regimes tanks or SWAT teams… but if the time comes… would we be able to stand alone?

Israel can be thankful that they have a leader with such courage… but then like Ruth and like David, this man was raised up for such a time as this.

Israeli Prime Minister sets the record straight.  Tells Obama “Not on MY watch” and explains the reality behind rejecting Obama’s suicidal solution.

However, from the taxpayer/consumer viewpoint, it’s just one more boondoggle that delivers less than promised at a higher than anticipated cost. If we are to believe the many groups dealing with worldwide hunger, as well as overpopulation alarmists, the world needs more food… and we are burning it in cars in our quest to free ourselves from servitude to the Saudis, Venezuelans and their cohorts.

Now, if it there were an economic benefit to this inefficient use of our land and other agricultural resources in this terminally politically correct world, it may be even be a halfway decent idea. But this is not the case. For virtually no decrease in our dependency on foreign oil, our friends in Washington dole out somewhere between 6 and 7 billion dollars a year to buy votes of mid-western farmers and farming conglomerates. It’s just the way things are done inside the beltway – take the taxpayers money and give it favored people or groups. Oh yes, even after forking over the subsidy dollars, we are also paying higher prices at the pump.

So while the pols have found a winning plan to meet their needs, we citizens are trapped in a double loss situation. But is it all that bad? It takes 450 pounds of corn to fill an average gas tank… about the same amount it takes to feed a person for a year. Somehow that doesn’t seem to be the best use of farm land we are told is insufficient to feed the hungry masses.

The ethanol propaganda efforts extend corruption sport of auto racing. The Indy Racing League has been using ethanol blends since 2005. They have been promoting this as a sign of good citizenship. It was a great public relations gimmick for a series struggling to regain the glories of past years. However, they ran afoul of the heartland corn growers by using Brazilian ethanol for several years. Their efforts to be a more international organization backfired in a country not that has had its fill of foreign intrusion.

Then there is NASCAR, the bastion of common sense driven good old boys. Corporatism has taken over to the point where even “Big Bill” France’s organization is “going green”. Current CEO Brian France has commented, “American Ethanol’s new partnership with NASCAR is much larger and more ambitious than a typical sports sponsorship. Here we have an entire industry looking to NASCAR to communicate its message that America is capable of producing its own renewable, greener fuel. The entire NASCAR industry will benefit from American Ethanol’s multi-faceted support of NASCAR, as well as from thousands of farmers and members of the ethanol supply chain now serving as new ambassadors for the sport.”

Major sponsorship at NASCAR means major dollars. Since the industry can only operate with subsidies from the national government, we can only conclude that, once again, our tax dollars are being used to convince us that beltway generated schemes are really good for us… and we should be happy to comply. Big Bill may be spinning in his grave.

Tom Buis, CEO of Growth Energy added, “E15 is an enormous opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, create U.S. jobs, and strengthen national energy security by reducing our dependence on foreign oil. There is nothing more American than NASCAR, and there is no fuel more American than ethanol. We are so proud that the bounty of American farming will be used in NASCAR racing.”

Is the whole world buying into Algore’s psychopated fantasies? No, but they really are trying to convince us to reject demon oil rather than push to drill for more. One can only think of the advice Adolph Hitler’s friend, Joseph Goebbels gave him, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

by Thomas Brewton

While flooding the banking system with excessive amounts of fiat dollars, Fed Chairman Bernanke has talked endlessly about the need to avert deflation. Unspoken was the real reason: promoting inflation – robbing retirees and working people who are saving to support their retirements – in order to fund mounting federal debt.

It’s now clear that government stimulus spending, under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and unending expansion of the money supply by the Fed, have prolonged our agonizingly slow economic revival. That is hardly surprising, since no previous resort to Keynesian macroeconomics has worked as advertised. At most they have promoted stock market bubbles, and all such essays, beginning in the 1930s Depression, have led to continual and ruinous inflation.

The New York Times, the nation’s premier voice of socialist propaganda, admits in a front page, lead article that Stimulus by Fed Is Disappointing, Economists Say.

Quote:

The Federal Reserve’s experimental effort to spur a recovery by purchasing vast quantities of federal debt has pumped up the stock market, reduced the cost of American exports and allowed companies to borrow money at lower interest rates.

But most Americans are not feeling the difference, in part because those benefits have been surprisingly small. The latest estimates from economists, in fact, suggest that the pace of recovery from the global financial crisis has flagged since November, when the Fed started buying $600 billion in Treasury securities to push private dollars into investments that create jobs.

The Times may be correct that “most Americans are not feeling the difference,” but we will suffer the consequences increasingly over the next year or so. The price of gasoline is a prominent harbinger.

As noted in The Price We Must Pay and The Weak Dollar Problem, the biggest factor in the oil price jump to around $110 per barrel is the Fed-induced devaluation of the dollar. That, by any other name, is inflation.

A subtext to deliberate inflation, which President Obama obviously doesn’t wish to publicize, is that it destroys incentives to save. In Keynesian dogma, saving is a social sin, on the false assumption that saving for future needs and future growth subtracts from consumer spending. Keynesians, of course, neglect to note that savings are placed in financial institutions that then lend and invest those funds to power economic growth.

The real aim of deliberate inflation is debilitating private business and individual consumers to such an extent that they are forced into becoming wards of the collectivized, socialist political state. New Deal economists, led by Harvard’s Alvin Hansen, propounded the Keynesian doctrine that capitalism had failed, and government would henceforth be required to take over employment and economic investment.

President Obama, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid made it abundantly clear that they aimed to create a New New Deal to finish FDR’s start at destruction of private enterprise and individual initiative. Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, a worshipper of the secular religion of socialism and its Keynesian economic dogma, has happily supported their efforts.

This article was originally published in The View From 1776 blog.

Archaeological digs within the last century have caused this cedar gate to re-emerge to our present generation. Initially, only the foundations of the gate were found, going down some 45 feet, with molded, unglazed figures. The gateway has been reconstructed in the Pergamon Museum, in Berlin, from the glazed bricks found. It sits there now as a major German, tourist attraction.

Biblical records show us that Nebuchadnezzar was responsible for bringing the kingdom of Judah to an end by his destruction of Jerusalem and carrying off the Jews into exile. The Ishtar Gate was the starting point for the processions. This gate was one of the eight gates of the inner city of Babylon.

There is a powerful message of present day significance within the re-emergence of this Gate. Revelation 17 warns us about the end-time danger of the woman arrayed in “purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls”, upon whose forehead the name was written: MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.

We are now in a season of great spiritual significance for Jews and Christians. It is a season that is as different as The Lamb is from a bunny rabbit. If we are not careful we can get lost amidst the attraction and festivities of the “Easter” Bunny and, just like with the Ishtar Gate, forget that its foundation was built in honor of the goddess Ishtar.

Over 1,300 years ago, a devout and well respected Benedictine monk known as Saint Bede clearly chronicled how Easter derived its name from Eostre, an Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring. A month corresponding to April had been named “Eostremonat,” or Eostre’s month, leading to “Easter” becoming applied to the Christian holiday that usually took place within it. “Prior to that, the holiday had been called Pesach (Passover).”

Based on the similarity of their names, many scholars connect Eostre with Ishtar, the Babylonian and Assyrian goddess of love and fertility. Ishtar was best known for her sexuality and her cult involved sacred prostitution. She had a voracious appetite for lovers and was personally known for being “the courtesan of other gods”.

Ishtar is the Babylonian goddess of fertility, love, war and sex. Just as the Babylonian militaristic and intellectual influence spread out across the globe, so too did their religion; re-surfacing internationally with different names. Hares and rabbits have long been symbols of fertility. The inclusion of the hare into Easter customs appears to have originated in Germany.

In second century Europe, the predominate spring festival where Easter was created from, was a raucous Saxon fertility celebration in honor of the Saxon goddess Eastre, whose sacred animal was a hare. The hare is often associated with moon goddesses; the egg and the hare together represent the god and the goddess, respectively.

For Christians, this season strongly commemorates the death and resurrection of Christ, but many may not realize or perhaps, may have forgotten that Christ’s sacrifice had nothing to do with starting a new religion or a festivity called Easter.

To best understand the fullness of this season of commemoration, we must look at the Jewish commemoration of Passover. If we look at the relevancy of the time of the last Supper with Yeshua and His disciples we will see that what they were celebrating was the Passover Seder (meal) and Christ was arrested that night and crucified the following afternoon.

The name “Passover” refers to the fact that G-d “passed over” the houses of the Jews when he was slaying the firstborn of Egypt; because of the blood on the door post (Exodus 12:7). For Christians it is the soul cleansing, demon chasing power of our Savior’s blood by which we have redemption.

The term Pesach refers to the lamb which was designated as the Passover sacrifice (called the Korban Pesach in Hebrew): Yeshua is that lamb!:

1Peter 1: 18 – 20: 18. Forasmuch as ye know that ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, from your vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers; 19. But with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot: 20. Who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you,

Yeshua is also our Passover (1Corinthians 5:7). It is imperative that we fully understand Passover so we can clearly understand what was done for us.

The Passover Seder is always eaten with unleavened (no yeast) bread. The most significant observance related to Passover involves the removal of chametz (this is the Hebrew word for yeast).

Any one that has ever successfully baked bread knows how dangerous the wrong yeast can be to the bloating or corruption of the loaf. Spiritually, the Bible likens yeast to religious hypocrisy (Mark 8:15) and other forms of evil (1 Corinthians 5:6-8; Galatians 5:9).

The Ishtar Gate of Babylon marked the beginning of the exile of the Jewish people, but the Via Dolorosa marked the prophesied season of their return. These gates were opened in Nebuchadnezzar’s day for Ishtar. They have been opened in our present, end-times to facilitate the world-wide worship of the beast:

Revelation 13:8: All inhabitants of the earth will worship the beast—all whose names have not been written in the Lamb’s book of life, the Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world.

My brothers and sisters, we must be careful because the splendor and fascination of age-old tradition can make us stumble into Ishtar’s Gate, but it is the Lamb and not the bunny that will deliver us (Revelation 7:10).

May the Korban Pesach (John 1:29) bless, strengthen and fill you during this sacred season.

Shabbat Shalom,

Pastor Alexis Wallace