The Ride Is Almost Over

A dear friend, now deceased, once told me that a few of his northern buddies gave him a hard time about his North Carolinian accent. “I don’t understand,” he said with his country wisdom. “Everyone has to come from some place.”

How right he was. We all come from somewhere, from some culture, and from two parents—none of which we were able to choose.

My father was in the military and, as a result, my family moved a lot. There were disadvantages to leaving friends and changing schools so often, but there were also plenty of opportunities to offset the downsides, one being the opportunity to live in different parts of the country and the world. I was privileged to call Alaska home prior to its statehood, spend two years in England, and live for various amounts of time in California, Utah, Texas, Colorado, and South Dakota. In addition, as an adult with my responsibilities in this Work, I’ve been privileged to live and work in other states, as well as spend nearly 14 years in Canada and one in England.

Recently, I took my wife and her sister on a road trip to parts of the United States that I remember from my youth but places they had never been. Of course, the better part of six decades having passed, much had changed and there was little I recognized other than the great beauty of the western Mountain States. We could hardly have chosen a better time to make the trip. This was a very wet winter and spring for Colorado and Wyoming, and everything was lush and green. Snow graced the mountains and rain clouds created perfect light conditions that painted spectacular landscapes before our eyes.

Someone said there are more antelope in Wyoming than people. Whether that’s true or not, I surely would not argue the point. Then there were the deer, elk, bighorn sheep, and buffalo, found even more abundantly as we neared Jackson Hole and Yellowstone National Park. What a blessed land America is, and when I say America, I mean more than the United States. I am including the second-largest country in the world—Canada—as we also drove into British Columbia and traveled through the spectacular Canadian Rockies.

But we saw a downside in our travels. We flew to Denver and, to save money on a rental car, I picked one up downtown. I had spent three years of my childhood in the “Mile High City” and had such fond memories of it—but this was not the city I remembered. As have so many major American cities, Denver has become “home” to many homeless derelicts. Signs advertising recreational cannabis can only worsen the problem, and Colorado passed a law this year legalizing “magic mushrooms.” It seems the state has decided to take its “Mile High” reputation in a foolish direction. Canada, too, has legalized cannabis. What societal benefit such decisions can bring is difficult to comprehend, but I’m sure there are those who are more than eager to argue in their favor—which reminds me of a T-shirt I saw on the trip that read, “I’m not arguing, I’m just explaining why I’m RIGHT.”

The Neglected Source of These Blessings

God promised blessings of great national wealth, abundance, and military might to the descendants of a man named Joseph, who was the brother of Judah. Since these national blessings were given to Joseph, not Judah, the description of what would become of Joseph’s descendants “in the last days” (Genesis 49:1) does not refer to the Jews (the descendants of Judah), but to another people.

Joseph is a fruitful bough, a fruitful bough by a well; his branches run over the wall. The archers have bitterly grieved him, shot at him and hated him, but his bow remained in strength, and the arms of his hands were made strong by the hands of the Mighty God of Jacob (from there is the Shepherd, the Stone of Israel), by the God of your father who will help you, and by the Almighty who will bless you with blessings of heaven above, blessings of the deep that lies beneath, blessings of the breasts and of the womb. The blessings of your father have excelled the blessings of my ancestors, up to the utmost bound of the everlasting hills. They shall be on the head of Joseph, and on the crown of the head of him who was separate from his brothers (Genesis 49:22–26).

But there is so much more to the description of Joseph’s end-time descendants.

And of Joseph he said: “Blessed of the Lord is his land, with the precious things of heaven, with the dew, and the deep lying beneath, with the precious fruits of the sun, with the precious produce of the months, with the best things of the ancient mountains, with the precious things of the everlasting hills, with the precious things of the earth and its fullness, and the favor of Him who dwelt in the bush. Let the blessing come ‘on the head of Joseph, and on the crown of the head of him who was separate from his brothers’” (Deuteronomy 33:13–16).

These are not the descriptions of the tiny state today called Israel and they are not prophecies of Judah (the Jews) but of one of his brothers. Whether or not one believes these prophecies apply to the British-descended and American peoples, one cannot deny that our peoples have been blessed with the choice places of the earth. It is not that there aren’t other blessed places on earth—there certainly are. But the collection of mineral and agricultural resources, military power, and strategic locations possessed by the peoples of America and those descended from Great Britain are unrivaled. But now, this long and prosperous ride of world prominence and power is almost over.

Tragically for those of us who are a part of those nations, many spit in the face of the God who gave these blessings. An increasing number of our people reject His very existence and reject the laws that He gave for our good and the good of our children. As the late Robert Bork wrote, we are “slouching toward Gomorrah,” a city God destroyed for gross immorality.

The prophet Daniel speaks of the end time as a period when “knowledge shall increase” (Daniel 12:4). Today, knowledge is increasing at rates never imagined by past generations. Yet the prophet Hosea tells us, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Because you have rejected knowledge, I also will reject you from being priest for Me; because you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children” (Hosea 4:6). And as Jeremiah put it, “For My people are foolish, they have not known Me. They are silly children, and they have no understanding. They are wise to do evil, but to do good they have no knowledge” (Jeremiah 4:22).

For far longer than we deserve, the British-descended and American peoples have walked the high ground of the world due to the blessings the Eternal God promised to Abraham. But this is coming to an end. Weather disaster follows weather disaster. The English are a thorn in the side of the European Union, even though the EU recognizes the importance of having them on board. America is despised in the eyes of allies and enemies alike. The national debt of the United States now tops $22 trillion and continues to grow. How sad for those of us living in these nations that we are squandering God’s blessings and grace—bringing on ourselves a coming day of reckoning.

If you would like to know more about the future of the American and British-descended peoples, and what that means for you no matter where you live, contact one of our Regional Offices on page 4 and ask for our free publication The United States and Great Britain in Prophecy, or read it online at TomorrowsWorld.org.