God's Punishment on America

I can't escape this image of God's punishment of America for our chutzpah the past four years, or the past four decades of Christian triumphalism after seeing the news below when I fired up my computer.



I read this book "The Jesus Machine" last month.  It's clear by the end of the book, circa 2007, American evangelicals were well on our way marching toward inordinate cultural and political power.  With James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, and Franklin Graham at our helm, Evangelicals were winning the culture war and about to conquer America.  Along the way we aggregated money and political power.  We would win many battles but lost our souls.



Ten years later we evangelicals elected Donald Trump to be our greatest president ever for he is our Anointed One.



He had fulfilled almost everything in our dream list.  We are more powerful than ever before, with our chosen president and our believer compatriots holding majority of governor mansions and state legislatures.  All executive branch cabinet heads and their deputies are professed Bible Believers, Mike Pompeo, Ben Carson, Betsy DeVos, to name a few.  Not only we are controlling the Executive and Legislative Branch, we will soon taking over the Supreme Court as well.  God is surely with us.

We are marching toward a Great Crusade to rid America the evils of abortion, homosexuality, hated federal regulations and bureaucracies that robbed us of our economic and religious freedom, gun freedom as well.  Secular humanism will be sent to the graveyard of history.  Our Great Leader Donald Trump is riding on a great economy and by the end of 2020 we would be marching toward our destiny of letting Biblical Laws rule the land.  Americans would know Christians will be the most powerful, to be reckon with, and people will flock to the great Bible Proclaiming Temples we built throughout the land.

But God, Creator of the Universe, ever omniscient, omnipresence, omnipotent, Lord and Savior, Alpha and Omega, had other ideas. The all-knowing God knew our hearts. Our pride and success blinded us. We became The Great Deceiver's followers.  For worldly and political gains we proclaimed His Name in vain.  We crowned Satan's Apprentice and called him The Lord's Anointed.

Calamity and Judgment is upon us.




Thus says the Lord.  You elected your Pharoah and worshiped him as idol. You listened to false prophets and blasphemed me making him King Cyrus.  As in the days of Moses, the Lord says, in fullness of your iniquities plagues will descend upon you and your Pharoah, for your God is a jealous God. You have brought suffering and calamity to the Land. Your cries and prayers shall not be heard for you show no mercy.  You love nobody but your own.  Your musics are bane to My ears.  The songs you sing grated My sense.  And your deeds piercing My Heart. Your words are empty.  You preached love but sow hate.  You saw signs but do not gauged for you are stiff-necked and hard-hearted.  On your account innocents are being killed.  You vipers and hypocrites.  Your Pharoah and his army will perish in the sea.  My wrath is upon you!   Know your God!  Confess and Repent!

==================================

The US economy has now erased all job gains since the Great Recession
Thomas Franck, CNBC

It took only five weeks for the U.S. economy to wipe out all the job gains it added over the last 11 years.

The coronavirus and forced business closures throughout the U.S. again buoyed the number of Americans applying for state unemployment benefits, which last week totaled 4.427 million, the Labor Department reported Thursday. 

Combined with the four prior jobless claims reports, the number of Americans who have filed for unemployment over the previous five weeks is 26.45 million. That number exceeds the 22.442 million jobs added to nonfarm payrolls since November 2009, when the U.S. economy began to add jobs back to the economy after the Great Recession.

The rapid nature of the job losses is unprecedented, wiping out more than a decade's worth of job gains in five weeks.

Investors won't receive the official look at the U.S. unemployment rate for the month of April until May 8. But the Labor Department's latest nonfarm payrolls report for March showed droves of layoffs at restaurants and bars as some state governments force the closure of the majority of their businesses.

The March nonfarm report showed payrolls plunged by 701,000 last month, marking the first decline since 2010 and the worst fall since March 2009. The unemployment rate jumped nearly a full percentage point to 4.4% from 3.5%.