Observations with the Editor – January 2018
I keep getting more impressed each month. Imagine, a sixteen-year old boy giving all of us older guys the best advice in the world. Basically, he is saying, “c’mon guys, let’s rev up this Israel Truth engine once again and instead of getting smaller, begin promoting our message to attract the younger generation”. You know, that isn’t bad advice and whether we have one year or twenty before the greatest rescue ever, we have a responsibility to convey the message of the blessed Kingdom and the Gospel of Salvation to Israelites around the globe. I had the pleasure in mid-November to have a one-hour conversation with this young man, who, along with his dedicated pastor, brought the Victoria, Australia BIWF back from ashes to a vibrant organization that has already held a successful conference.
His name is Perry Thorp and he is the Editor of The National Covenant Message. Here’s his latest message, entitled “Time to Adapt”. “There is a crisis in British-Israel believing associations worldwide due to the lack of young people coming to know the truth. The associations everywhere have remained diligent but the attacks on Christianity from Satan and the Roman Catholic doctrine have been relentless. However, new opportunities are opening in this age of technology to generate a new audience using digital information.
Expanding the British-Israel outreach to social media platforms will create a huge audience so adapting is the key; my 71-year-old grandmother is excited to upload her first photo to social media yesterday reaching a new technical milestone in her pursuit to adapt to change. Young people rely on ‘smart phone’ technology to meet much of their daily social and other digital needs opening up a new avenue to gain a captive audience for spreading the British-Israel message. Biblical Truth associations’ worldwide need to focus on making available digital newsletters, magazines and books to increase the library of information people can access online in an instant.
Associations need to look into expanding onto websites, updating them regularly and creating short videos of small bits of information, using visual creativity to catch the attention of the young audiences.
Speaking of Old-Timers, our Association lost a mighty good man in Fred Walter, who passed away in October at the age of 90. You probably never heard of Fred but there were few like him. He was a mainstay at our Burnaby office and bookstore for over ten years and this modest man rarely missed an opportunity to encourage anyone who would listen about the beauty of studying news of the Kingdom, Salvation and the Israel Truth. I first met him in 1992 when he just wandered in at one of our meetings, but he realized immediately that he was an Israelite and that was it, he decided right there and then to spend as much of the rest of his retirement years as he could, working for the Lord. You know, one thing always stood out with me about Fred, each Sunday, until a couple of years ago, he would go miles out of his way to pick up older people to bring them to and from the Sunday meetings. He was a very special servant of God and we shall miss him greatly. “With a long life I will satisfy him. And let him see My salvation.” (Psalm 91:16)
Carrying on in this vein, we lost some pretty wonderful friends and readers in 2017. The happy thing is that they closed their lives knowing that the Lord Jesus Christ will soon return to establish His Kingdom. I can tell you that many of these departed friends were a great inspiration to me and I learned so much from my conversations and other communications with them. I doubt if they would want us to be sad but instead take solace that we shall be together again in the Kingdom. Lord Alfred Tennyson wrote “Crossing the Bar”, a favourite, I think, of one lady from eastern Canada, whom I never met but talked to on least two or three occasions a year. The opening stanza depicted her message to loved ones left behind.
Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar
When I put out to sea.
A bag with a hole in it! Today, we hear about the accumulation of wealth in a few hands while poverty and just getting by is growing leaps and bounds. The disparity between rich and poor shows no sign of letting up. In talking about this at a recent Bible Study, Dick Davis, a long-time member, referred us to Haggai 1:6, “You have sown much, but you have reaped little; you eat, but you do not have enough; you drink, but you do not have your fill; you clothe yourselves, but no one is warm: ………” We’ll stop here for a moment just to interpret, “No matter how much this particular section of the wealthy has, it is never enough”. This is why, in verse 4, God tells them that while they live sumptuously, the nation is going the other way, with poverty and unemployment skyrocketing. So, the latter part of verse 6 “and he who earns wages has earned them to put them in a bag with holes in it” is simply a reflection of wages being so small, they quickly disappear, and workers cannot meet expenses, thus more debt. And workers are forced to take what they can get, because over the past decades, jobs have gone to non-Israelite countries to increase profits and for the same reason, cheap labour has been imported. A double witness to Haggai 1:6, is John 5:4 and here God tells these unscrupulous rich that they are withholding the wages of workers by fraud and there is a cry for vengeance. The final result, as Mr. Davis points out, is that what they have done through their greed and self-indulgence is fatten their hearts in the [coming] day of their slaughter. Not a pretty end for them but in the final analysis, the unscrupulous rich shall reap what they sow.
Terrorism will run its course. Evil will exist only as long as the Lord permits. Psalm 34:16 tells us this, “The face of the LORD is against evildoers, To cut off the memory of them from the earth”. I think the late Reverend Ansley F. Rash gave us wonderful advice, as we watch the wicked events of evil-doers. He wrote, “We live in dark days. Days of chaos and confusion, perplexity and fear, but let us not cast away our confidence, remembering the words of Malachi, the last prophet of the old covenant: “I am the Lord, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed.”‘
