Some time after Noa, our first child, was born, I received an invitation to a red carpet film premier. Being newly inducted in the movie industry, I was both enthusiastic and obliged to attend. Up to that point I had kissed my baby girl every night, like I still do, but on that particular evening, I left straight from work and missed my good night kiss. When I arrived home rather late, and on my way to bed checked in, looking down at her sleeping bundle of fuzzy flesh wrapped in woolly cotton, barricaded in a borrowed cot, like she was a precious seed neatly tucked in a furrow, just waiting to be watered.
The following morning I quickly shuffled to her room like I usually did, to see if she was awake for our usual gargle about NASA, you know the conversations where you both periodically point up at the sky through the ceiling in puffs of disbelief. But that particular morning when I approached her cot, Noa was already sitting upright in a pink floral dress, white sandals on her bigger feet, a bush of blonde curly hair, and said with a rather mature smile; “good morning daddy.”
Noa was four years old! I had missed four years of her life after one late night!
It was at this point I woke up in a sweat and hot-footed to Noa’s room, relieved to find the same purring velvety bundle from the night before.
Before I emigrated from South Africa, my mother sat down me down for a candid conversation. In amongst all the things she spoke, I remember one piece of advice. She admonished me not to be like my father; “don’t be a workaholic”, as was already my unfortunate disposition. The thing about a mother’s voice, it never leaves your head, and so I have heeded that warning, together with that four year sleep I happened to have all in one night during my first year in Ausomestralia, adjusted and fought the good fight for a good work life balance. I have come to appreciate that if no one told me I had the proclivity for excessive compulsive work habits, I would never have seen it, my children would have suffered and I would have never questioned our eventual estrangement, concluding that the descending bitterness and despair was a npart of normal life, and died, long before hitting dirt.
Parents and their relationships with their children have been on my mind, rank in my retinas for a very long time. I find myself constantly analysing the body language of the fathers and sons I pass at sporting activities, scrutinising the subtext in conversations between mothers and daughters sitting at coffee shop tables beside ours, when I really should be listening to Jenni’s new and exciting chores list for me.
Living in an area of bankers and lawyers, with some having the tendency to be weekend dads, troubles me immensely, so much so that a number of years ago I wrote a screenplay called: “My Dad’s a Zombie”, about a father who dies in a car crash, and after arriving in heaven’s waiting room realises he had not fulfilled a childhood promise to take his now teenage daughter to the sea, then managing to escape repossesses his decaying body to fullfill that promise. Now with heaven’s agents on his tail and his wife trying to kill what she sees as a zombie apocalypse abducting her daughter, the story attempts to answer these questions; will he make it, and what will he, and we learn from his ordeal? Whoops, I slipped into a sales pitch there for a minute. Get it on thankyoubackbone.com soon. Oops, another sales pitch.
As the world becomes increasingly secularised, attacking Biblical values and God’s name is stripped away from mediating institutions, including families, it is no surprise that we have a society floundering for meaning and identity, resulting in more people throwing their entire selves into work to find their new identities, and subsequent purpose. The consequence is the unborn are murdered in yet another age of sex-as-commodity, and the newborn suffer lengthy periods of abandonment, forced to grow up with leftovers, as leftovers, until such time they themselves perpetuate this identity crisis.
Spending quality time with your children is a tremendously serious and noble thing, and right up there with the salvation of souls, but I cannot magnify and emphasise the gravitas and solemnity of that statement, without invoking a supremely important prophecy, which I am compelled to quote for you now.
“See, I will send the prophet Elijah to you before that great and dreadful day of the Lord comes. He will turn the hearts of the parents to their children, and the hearts of their children to their parents, or else I will come and strike the land with total destruction.” (Malachi 4:6)
Let’s dismember this dire ditty.
What is this great and dreadful day of the Lord? For you and me it is the end of the world. It will only last seven years before the second coming, after which judgement and eternal bliss. If you would like supporting scripture I will send it to you no problem. Who is Elijah? He’s was a prophet that lived long ago but never died. Instead he was taken up into heaven on a fiery chariot. Why? Because during the seven years of trouble there will be two witnesses who will be killed and after three days raised. One of them is Elijah, because scripture states that it is appointed for everyone to die once, so this will be Elijah’s return and moment for martyrdom. Enoch is the other. What is Elijah going to do? Turn the hearts of the parents to their children, and turn the hearts of children to their parents. He is going to put the responsibility on the parents first. How is Elijah going to do that? Malachi doesn’t tell us how. What will happen if Elijah fails? We’re all dead. The end.
It is the question of HOW Elijah will turn hearts that has me most perplexed. How will he do it? Will he stop it from raining like he did back then, or will it be the modern implication in making the entire world’s women barren? Will nations then see their end and desire children? Will he make the remnant of Israel the only group of people able to conceive? Would that explain Christ’s cryptic end time words; “How terrible it will be for pregnant women and nursing mothers in those days.” We don’t know.
But what we do know is statistics tell us that sons who have lousy relationships with their fathers, are less likely to trust a Heavenly Father, and so apostasy is perpetuated almost by this one thing alone, which is why it is of such a concern to me and so, while we wait for him to return in his fiery chariot, if you could allow me to make just one point.
This verse in Malachi… has everything to do with abortion.
God hates abortion. It is the modern day equivalent of child sacrifice to the licentious god Baal. Where God told Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply, ‘Planned Parenthood’ have championed abortion. Society tries to deal with abortion as if it were a symptom, when the cause is predominantly a licentious and sinful lifestyle that defiantly refuses to be questioned and repaired. The heart of such a mother can only be cold and bitter, and needs to be warmed and softened, to embrace the child growing inside of her. Similarly, the father’s heart responsible for putting that life so casually and recklessly into such a woman, is stony and hard, and needs to turned be softened, demonstrating a compassionate consideration towards the plight of a precious life that is longing to revere a daddy, a man, who reveres a woman, that will serve as proof that the world is indeed a wonderful place to enter into. Rape and incest, though small statistics in comparison, are held up as bastions for the pro-abortion argument, and if that’s you, know that nothing is impossible with God, for He will not abort you during your trauma, if you are His.
Jonathan Cahn is a Messianic Rabbi who recently wrote an explosive book called THE PARADIGM, wherein he explains, in staggering detail, to what lengths the Clintons, and the heir to their apostasy, Barack Obama, went to, in attacking and removing Biblical values from American society and its military, and most especially their propagation of abortion, even funding and forcing the practice in other African countries. Donald Trump, following the biblical blueprint of Jehu, came into office to momentarily reverse the apostasy before it was sealed, because had Hillary come into power, she would have immediately struck down the last two protections – the Helms Amendment in place since 1973, which guarded against funding abortion through foreign assistance funds, and the Hyde Amendment in place since 1976 to guard against the financing of abortions through federal Medicaid funding, making every voting American taxpayer complicit in the blood of the innocent, not to mention ultimately culling voters in a one-sided, anti-Judeo-Christian race.
God loathes abortion.
With apostasy in our western civilisation, characterised when good is called evil, and evil called good, when the ruling principle is no longer Biblical but Pagan – the fallacy being that secularism is the indecisive state between – then the people of God ceases to be a ruling phenomenon but a prophetic phenomenon, and when that happens, as we have it today, then we must become, what the prophet Elijah was in a pagan context. As Jonathan writes: “The Judeo-Christian faith must change from functioning as a cultural phenomenon to a counter cultural one. Its people must increasingly become a revolutionary people, a prophetic people.” As the nation becomes radically immoral, so the morals will appear radical, and we God’s people, will be increasingly viewed with contempt, as enemies of the state, and so we invariably become the figurative Elijahs of our age.
God has always provided for Elijah, even in the days of famine he was never dependent on the culture that surrounded him, but a man of deep prayer and communion with God, and like him we need to be cemented in the Word and principles of God, refusing to be redefined by those around us who will pass away into oblivion. The temptation is always to capitulate to surrounding culture and soften our stance. This cannot be. As darkness grows darker, so should lights burn brighter.
Three thousand years ago Elijah put forward a god-contest, where the pagan people had to prove the worth of their god Baal, and he, Elijah, would show them his. He did this so the people could choose, not only between two gods but between two fathers – like Rastignac had to choose between two fathers, the doting Goirot or the satanic Vautrin, in Balzac’s novel Le Pere Goirot – but in order to do so Elijah had to repair Israel’s original altar, and in today’s language that altar of sacrifice is the cross on which Jesus died for our sins. Consider seriously the dispensation of grace we are in, because, according to the Biblical blueprint, grace is the final dispensation before the dispensation of judgement.
Look around, we are once again on Mount Carmel. Whether in the public square where it is once again thrust, or in private, vacillating between two gods is a matter of life or hell. Not to decide is the same as deciding against it, as Christ’s binary message reinforces; “for whoever is not against you, is for you”, so choose well, choose your God.
Our Heavenly Father turned His heart towards us when His boy died, and we are tearfully compelled to turn our hearts towards Him… if we are to put together the two broken halves… of the broken heart… of our broken world.
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