Racial Strife in Prophecy
Racial Strife in Prophecy
By Terry James
I remember as a teenager my dad telling me that Papa (his father, whom we grandchildren called “Daddy James”) said that one day there would be a great racial war in America. My grandfather, who was, among many other things, a school teacher and Pentecostal preacher in south Arkansas, apparently was well known in the region and was sought out for his opinion and advice by politicians and many others. His assessment was that the treatment being given black people would one day come back to haunt the nation.
I heard the story many times from my father and from others within our family on the James side. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the memories of those stories at age fifteen, even during the 1957 integration crisis at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.
That crisis seemed to sort of work itself out, with a lot of help from President Dwight D. Eisenhower and a national guard that the president took out from under the command of Governor Orval Faubus.
As a tenth grader, the racial things just didn’t register very strongly with me. There was complete segregation at the time in my hometown, and Benton High School seemed a continent away from the epicenter of the great controversy of integration vs segregation—although my high school was no more than twenty-five miles from Central High in Little Rock.
The current racial crisis, as I view it as a septuagenarian, finally brings into focus the forward thinker man Daddy James apparently was…
I don’t know how much Bible prophecy played into his thinking. I just knew him when I was a teenager. He died in 1958 and, to me, he was kind of a grumpy old guy with thick, white, tousled hair and white, bushy eyebrows. He was a big, burly, man who sat around at 80-something and grumbled in curmudgeon fashion at us youngsters whenever we tried to get into his violin case in one corner of the room where his favorite chair sat. He was a gifted musician and artist.
I have to think, now, that his observations were somewhat inspired. I’ve always been told that Daddy James was a genius, with few social graces—of which he didn’t wish to indulge, at any rate, because he was inwardly turned.
He was quite the Bible student, family and friends said. This makes me wonder whether Bible prophecy played deeply into his pontification during the rare times he cared to wax eloquent on America’s future racial problems.
Whether he possessed a degree of prescience I don’t know. But here we are, and there is a great racial divide that could break into a civil war of sorts. This especially since of the most volatile areas of the country have governors and mayors who are thinking about defunding police departments, and even about completely doing away with them, in order to correct wrongs done to the black race.
Certainly corrections need to be made in ways that would assure that racial profiling and bigotry are not allowed within police departments. What happened to George Floyd should never be allowed to happen again. But it will. It is inevitable. Whether through deliberate, hate-filled racial bigotry or simply a completely lawful act by a law enforcement official to apprehend someone suspected of a criminal act, it will happen again.
There are always going to be lawbreakers, and there are always going to be bigots. As the saying goes, you can’t legislate morality. You can make laws to enforce compliance, but only God can change spiritual hearts. He does so through the saving of souls one individual at a time.
To want to defund law enforcement is nothing short of insanity, unless we want complete anarchy to rule. And one being does indeed want this scenario.
Satan, of course, is the personage stirring the pot of racial hatreds. He and his minions, both demonic and human, are active. Their chief aim is to bring America into the globalist order for the wind-up of the age, to establish his man, Antichrist, on the platform of control Lucifer the fallen one wants.
Satan’s hatred for humanity is infinitely greater than the leftists’ hatred for President Donald Trump. And this president is the target at the center of this crisis—the one I guess Gideon Johnson James—Daddy James—somehow foresaw.
Or maybe he just took the Word of Jesus, Himself, and extrapolated the evil that he perceived to be on its way to become an incendiary bomb that would explode near the time Christ would return.
I kind of sense that Daddy James read the following and cogitated quite a bit on the things within.
“For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.” – (Matthew 24:7)
It is stunning, regarding Jesus’ prophecy here. We are experiencing these very symptoms of things the Lord foretold for the very end of the age. They are part of the convergence we have been experiencing for some time during these past several years.
He said there will be famines, meaning famines of unusual dimension and cause. Jesus always spoke in terms that indicated things He prophesied will be far beyond normal levels.
The African continent and some Asian and other areas are experiencing a likelihood of growing famine. This growing probability of famine is the result of the second thing Jesus said in this prophetic verse. There is pestilence. Pestilence in the form of disease runs rampant in those areas of the world mentioned. And, as we know, pestilence in the form of the Wuhan virus is running rampant throughout the world as well.
But, beyond this, pestilence in the form of locust swarms, and even swarms of deadly hornets, the likes of which haven’t been seen since ancient times, are denuding the agricultural lands that feed the populations affected.
All the while the famines and pestilences are devastating broad swaths of the world, the great human plague is developing that has at its center bigotry and racial hatred.
Jesus foretold that “nation shall rise against nation.”
The Greek word for “nation,” here, as we have seen before, is ethnos. This means “ethnic,” of course…race—i.e., races will rise up against other races.
Perhaps my grandfather didn’t have the gift of prophecy—certainly not in the sense of Old and New Testament prophets. There is no such gift today. One thing sure, though, our Lord did and does have that ability. It sure appears He was foretelling this very moment of racial strife.
This is, I believe, all to remind those of us who truly believe every Word in the Bible that His call to us must be near indeed.
“For when you see all these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your head, for your redemption draws near.” – (Luke 21: 28)
—Terry