Posted: 23 Mar 2016 Michael Snyder THE ECONOMIC COLLAPSE BOG
In the wake of the horrible bombings in Brussels, Barack Obama is insisting that there is no need to change our approach in the fight against ISIS. He believes that Islamic terror is not a fundamental threat to our way of life, and he wants all of us to be convinced that the way that he is handling ISIS right now is just fine.
Well, in this article you are going to learn some very shocking things about Obama and ISIS that are likely to make you very angry. It turns out that our allies Saudi Arabia and Turkey have been arming, funding and aiding ISIS and other radical jihadist groups such as the al-Nusra Front (al-Qaeda in Syria), and Obama has known about it all along. The goal was to take down the Assad regime in Syria, and the American people were never supposed to find out the truth. Earlier today, Barack Obama told reporters that ISIS is not “an existential threat to us” during a news conference down in Argentina. You can see video of him making these remarks right here. But at the same time, he is promising “to continue to go after” ISIS until they are “finally destroyed”… The United States will “continue to go after ISIL aggressively until it’s removed from Syria and from Iraq and finally destroyed,” Obama said, using another name for ISIS.So what precisely is Obama actually doing to pursue this “top priority”? We are told that the U.S. military is bombing ISIS targets, but in all the months that this has been happening, U.S. aircraft never targeted the endless convoys of ISIS oil trucks that were transporting stolen oil into Turkey. It has been estimated that ISIS sold 800 million dollars worth of oil in Turkey, and Obama knew about it the entire time. Why didn’t Obama say anything about this or do anything to stop it? When the Russians came in, they showed satellite evidence of what was happening to the entire world and they immediately began bombing those oil convoys into oblivion. But why hadn’t the U.S. already done that? Massive convoys of oil trucks that stretched as far as the eye could see would go back and forth over the Turkish border completely unmolested and Obama did nothing. In fact, if the Russians had not come in and bombed the living daylights out of those convoys it would still be happening. This should be the biggest Obama scandal of them all, and yet nobody is talking about it. Sometimes I think that I must be going crazy because what Obama did was so obviously wrong and yet nobody wants to touch this. For much more on all of this, please see my previous article entitled “The Biggest Obama Scandal? He Knows That Turkey Is Buying Oil From ISIS And He Is Doing Nothing To Stop It“. In addition, Obama knows that both Saudi Arabia and Turkey continue to provide advanced weaponry to ISIS and the al-Nusra Front. He also knows that ISIS fighters use Turkey as a home base, and that when they are injured fighting in Syria they hop back over the border where they are treated at hospitals inside Turkish territory. But have you heard Obama say anything about these things? Has he done anything to stop any of this from happening? No. The reason why Obama hasn’t done or said anything is because ISIS and the other radical jihadist groups were supposed to win in Syria. Once they had overthrown Assad, then the U.S., the Saudis and the Turks were going to come in and set up a Sunni puppet government. Of course Russian intervention has completely changed the game, and so now the Sunni militants are losing. That is why Saudi Arabia and Turkey are in such a panic about what is going on in Syria right now. And we are also learning that western intelligence agencies had advance knowledge of the attacks in Brussels. The following comes from a Haaretz report… The Belgian security services, as well as other Western intelligence agencies, had advance and precise intelligence warnings regarding the terrorist attacks in Belgium on Tuesday, Haaretz has learned.So what are we to make of this? Was this terror attack allowed to happen? Could it be possible that someone out there helped make it happen? Don’t get me wrong – I don’t want to minimize the threat of Islamic terror one bit. I just wonder sometimes which side our government is actually on. And ISIS is warning of more attacks in the near future. In fact, they are telling us that what is coming “will be more devastating and bitter”…  All over the planet, radical Islam is on the rise. These jihadists have a fanatical hatred for Christians and for Jews, and their ultimate goal is world conquest. And an act of terror does not have to result in mass casualties. Examples of what I am talking about are all over the place. Earlier today, I came across a Christian Post article that talked about how two radical Muslims hacked a 68-year-old Christian convert to death with machetes in the nation of Bangladesh… Unidentified attackers hacked a Christian convert to death this week in northern Bangladesh in the latest attack in the Muslim-majority country.Many in the western world may dismiss a story like this because it was the death of only one man. But what happens when these radical jihadists start getting their hands on bigger weapons? Former president Ronald Reagan once made the following statement… “I don’t think you can overstate the importance that the rise of Islamic fundamentalism will have to the rest of the world in the century ahead-especially if, as seems possible, its most fanatical elements get their hands on nuclear and chemical weapons and the means to deliver them against their enemies.”The use of a single chemical, biological or nuclear weapon in a major western city would set off panic on a scale that would be unlike anything we have ever seen before. Even something as basic as sarin gas could accomplish what I am talking about. Sarin gas has been used in both Syria and Iraq in the past, and it is exceedingly deadly. The following comes from the Huffington Post… Inhaled or absorbed through the skin, the gas kills by crippling the respiratory center of the central nervous system and paralyzes the muscles around the lungs.Of course there are other chemical weapons that are many, many times more lethal than sarin gas, and it is inevitable that terrorists will get their hands on biological and nuclear weapons at some point as well. Yes, terror organizations such as ISIS most definitely do represent “an existential threat” to our way of life. Unfortunately, we have a man in the White House that does not seem particularly inclined to protect us from this threat. |
The Christian faith is built on the undeniable, unshakeable truth that Jesus was raised from the dead. It is also founded on the historical fact that the Savior suffered unimaginable pain when Roman soldiers nailed Him to a cross.
I hope you will ponder that pain as you celebrate the death and resurrection of Christ this weekend.
When the movie The Passion of the Christ was released 12 years ago, Hollywood insiders mocked it because it offered a realistic—and extremely bloody—depiction of Jesus' torture and death. Regardless of what you think of controversial director Mel Gibson, he did a masterful job of capturing the brutality of a first-century Roman execution.
I know some Christians who objected to the R-rated violence of Gibson's movie, as if what happened to Jesus should be reduced to the sanitized charm of a Renaissance-era painting. But the truth is that what Jesus suffered on Good Friday was R-rated. It was spattered with blood and horrifying to watch.
Nobody performed an autopsy on Jesus' mangled body after He was taken down from the cross. But doctors who have studied the Bible's description of His death say the pain would have been beyond excruciating. In fact, the word excruciating means "out of the cross." Jesus literally defined the worst pain anyone could feel.
His suffering began in Gethsemane, when God laid the sins of the world on His beloved Son. Hebrews 5:7 says Jesus offered up prayers "with loud crying and tears" during this moment of anguish. Luke's Gospel says the agony was so strong that Jesus' sweat "became like drops of blood, falling down upon the ground" (Luke 22:44). The intense stress caused what physicians call hematidrosis, a condition in which blood seeps out of sweat glands.
After His arrest, Jesus was flogged so mercilessly that his skin was stripped off His back, exposing muscle and bone. The soldiers who tortured Jesus would have used a weapon called a flagellum—a whip that had several leather strands with lead balls or shards of bone attached to the ends.
The cuts inflicted by this whip could actually rip open the flesh and expose internal organs. Jesus would have lost a significant amount of blood after His scourging—and this would explain why He did not have the strength to carry His cross all the way to Calvary.
Matthew 27:28-29 says the Roman soldiers stripped Jesus naked and then twisted together a handmade crown made of thorns to mock His kingship. Bible scholars believe these thorns were extremely long and hard. When the thorns pierced the top and side of His head, Jesus would have most likely experienced what doctors call "trigeminal neuralgia"—piercing pain all over the head and face.
After this merciless abuse, Jesus was covered with a red robe and led to Golgotha. There, Roman soldiers drove seven-inch metal spikes into his wrists (most likely hitting the median nerve, causing more blinding pain) and then they rammed another spike into his feet.
At that point, doctors say, Jesus would have suffered dislocation of His shoulders, cramps and spasms, dehydration from severe blood loss, fluid in His lungs and eventual lung collapse and heart failure.
Yet Jesus refused to drink wine mixed with gall, a pain-killing solution offered to Him by his executioners (Matt. 27:34). He chose to endure the full impact of the pain.
He felt that pain for us.
Some victims of Roman crucifixion took as long as nine days to die, but Jesus' death came in a matter of hours—probably because He had been flogged so cruelly before He was nailed to the rough wood. Victims of crucifixion typically developed serious dehydration because of a lack of blood and oxygen.
As Jesus took His last breath, He said: "It is finished." He was actually quoting the last verse of Psalm 22, a psalm He recited throughout His torture. It is one of the most graphic prophecies about Christ's suffering in the Old Testament—and Jesus knew it was about Him.
Jesus willingly poured out His blood on that cruel cross. It was an ugly, revolting, disgusting scene. We don't have to downplay the violence or muffle the gut-wrenching cries. The Bible does not soften the impact or censor the cruelty of Jesus's suffering. Isaiah 53:6 says: "But the Lord has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on Him."
God laid the sins of the world on Jesus, and then He sacrificed Him as the one and only Lamb of God. Isaiah 53 goes on to say: "But He was pierced through for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities." He took all that pain to fully pay the price so that we could be forgiven.
This Easter, please don't settle for a G-rated, greeting-card version of the cross. Consider the depths of the agony Jesus experienced when He died for you. He took the pain we deserved.
J. Lee Grady is the former editor of Charisma. You can follow him on Twitter at leegrady. He is the author of several books including 10 Lies the Church Tells Women, 10 Lies Men Believe, Fearless Daughters of the Bible and The Holy Spirit Is Not for Sale. You can learn more about his ministry, The Mordecai Project, atthemordecaiproject.org.
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P.S. In light of the Brussels attack and the President's decision to devote exactly fifty one seconds of his speech in Cuba to highlighting it—in light of the fact that he choose to go to a baseball game with a murdering dictator who throws his people in prisons without a trial (and even do the wave with him) instead of showing some respect to the victims of terror, this word is even more relevant. 
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