How Can You Understand This Mad World?

The world around us has gone insane. News media are pushing a plan to defund the police. Winston Churchill is coming under attack for being “racist.” Big businesses are cheering on the Marxist movement behind it all. And the police simply walk way—as police chiefs and mayors decide that upholding the rule of law isn’t worth the effort.

How did the world get so crazy? It almost defies understanding.

Mainstream politicians and businesses pledge support and donate to Black Lives Matter (blm), an organization that claims to protest the “state-sanctioned violence and anti-black racism” present in America and Britain. Its website states that they “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family.” Their leaders encourage people to resist “white capitalism.”

“We have to not only disrupt the systems of policing that literally kill our people, but we have to disrupt the white supremacist, capitalistic, patriarchal, heteronormative system that is really the root cause of these police killings,” said California State University professor Melina Abdullah, a blm leader.

Yet this wildly radical movement is being supported by Disney, Facebook, Lego and dozens of other major companies. Cisco, Microsoft and Intel have all donated to blm. Barclays, JP Morgan Chase, Deloitte and others have supported the movement.

They do know what Communists think of big business, right? Chief executives and bankers don’t exactly prosper in Marxist revolutions.

Meanwhile the whole discussion has become a fact-free zone. If anyone brings up statistics or numbers in depth, you know which side of the argument they’re on without even listening to what they have to say. The blm movement, on the other hand, releases a wall of emotion.

Only nine unarmed black men died at the hands of police in 2019. That’s less than the number of people killed in the latest bout of rioting. Twice that number were killed in just 24 hours in Chicago on May 31. If you are an unarmed white male interacting with the police, you’re twice as likely to be killed as an unarmed black man in the same situation. There are racist individuals in both the United States and the United Kingdom, but there is no evidence of systemic racism.

I could go on, but I don’t need to. The vast majority of Americans oppose the blm riots, with 58 percent supporting bringing in the U.S. military to help control them and only 30 percent opposing. If you’re reading this, odds are you see the craziness. And if you don’t, there are plenty more articles with more stats elsewhere.

Of course, the rioters’ views may not stay in the fringe for long. Just over 10 years ago, far-left presidential candidate Barack Obama opposed homosexual “marriage.” Now same-sex “marriage” is the law of the land across and the U.S. and UK—and even most conservatives support it. Defunding the police may seem extreme now, but how long will it stay that way?

Here at the Trumpet we advertise ourselves as “a magazine of understanding.” How do you understand a world gone so insane? Are you one of many looking at the world and shaking your head, wondering how on earth we got here?

At this point, things are so crazy there is only one place that has any answers.

What makes the Trumpet different is that we base our analysis of world conditions on the Bible. It’s the Bible that gives us that understanding.

That often seems strange to people. No other newsmagazine has that approach. But as you look around the world in June 2020, ask yourself, Is there any other way to understand what is happening?

For years, we’ve been writing about the spiritual dimension of world events. We have said that there is a real, spirit world and a real devil. We have said that God is working out a plan here below, and has worked with nations like Britain and America. We’ve explained how Satan consequently hates Britain and America, and is working to destroy them. And he has the power to stir up irrational emotions in people.

How else do you explain the extremes we’re seeing right now? Irrational mobs have been around for centuries. But usually they have something to set them off. It took famine or military defeat to spark the French and Communist revolutions. Why are we seeing mass insanity now, when the average poor person has air conditioning and a smartphone?

Read through Isaiah 59 and you get an excellent description of America’s cities: “Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands afar off; for truth has fallen in the public squares, and uprightness cannot enter” (verse 14; Revised Standard Version). Doesn’t that describe the public squares of so many of our cities today—overrun by mobs. “Truth is never to be seen, and moral sense has left the town,” states the Moffatt translation.

Instead we are “speaking oppression and revolt, conceiving and uttering from the heart lying words” (verse 13; rsv).

For our people today, “The way of peace they know not, and there is no justice in their paths; they have made their roads crooked, no one who goes in them knows peace” (verse 8; rsv).

Doesn’t that describe those who want to defund the police? They believe that if you take money away from the police department and put it into education, help for the homeless, and schemes for eliminating poverty, you can stop crime. Anyone who follows that road will not know peace. That thinking is based on a fundamentally flawed view of both human nature and poverty. Human nature is not fundamentally good, pushed into crime through poverty or mental health problems.

Reducing poverty lies in the opposite direction—in establishing the rule of law and property rights.

Instead we see our streets filled with rioting and destruction. As Isaiah 59:7 says, “Their feet run to evil, and they make haste to shed innocent blood; their thoughts are thoughts of iniquity, desolation and destruction are in their highways” (rsv).

Meanwhile, big business kowtows to the mob. Anyone who speaks out is shouted down. “He that departs from evil makes himself a prey” as verse 15 puts it.

Passages like these inform us of what is happening, why it is happening, and where it is leading.

I can’t remember a time when the news was so frustrating. And here the Bible helps too. Where do you see any real hope for our world? How do you turn things around when they are this far gone?

There is only one source for real understanding and hope. Isaiah 59:20 assures us that “the Redeemer shall come to Zion, and unto them that turn from transgression in Jacob, saith the Lord.” God is in control. He foresaw this crazy world. And He has a plan to bring a real, lasting solution to all the world.

If you’ve not really been convinced of the Trumpet’s Bible-based approach, or if you have never really dug into what we teach, now is the time to change that. This world is only going to get crazier, and you’re simply not going to get answers anywhere else.

A great place to start is Herbert W. Armstrong’s book The United States and Britain in Prophecy, which contains, as he described, “the strongest proof of the inspiration and authority of the Holy Bible! It is, at the same time, the strongest proof of the very active existence of the living God!”

This book shows what God is doing on Earth—His plan behind the headlines. You can read the whole book online, but I encourage you to request your own free print copy. We will mail it to you, just about anywhere you might be in the world, with no charge for postage, packaging, handling or any other hidden costs. Your name and address stay private. And we won’t contact you for any follow-up. There are no strings or catches. We are simply a group of people that understands that this is the only source of hope and understanding that there is. We know God provides the answers, the hope, and the means to get it out there: We want to share it with as many people as possible. Please order The United States and Britain in Prophecy today.