Edge of Apocalypse Today

Washington, DC   Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s testimony last week to the Senate urged lawmakers to quickly pass the new START nuclear weapons treaty with Russia that the Obama Adminstration negotiated.  That debate, coupled with today’s media reports about Iran made us do a double take:  the two of us are currently working on the sequel to our futuristic novel, Edge of Apocalpyse. These events of recent days are hitting close to home. We won’t spoil anything for our readers, but the Russia-Iran connection cannot be ignored, and will be explored in our next book scheduled for release in 2011.  

If we don’t sign the “START” nuclear weapons treaty with Russia, according to Mrs. Clinton’s testimony, then “our national security is at risk.”  But we think that the terms of this treaty WILL put our nation at risk.  In the preamble, the treaty says that America will be prevented from developing defensive anti-nuclear missile systems if they have the potential of weakening the “viability and effectiveness” of Russia’s nuclear force.  Some may argue that such a preamble has no legal effect: not true. Particularly where the terms of a treaty (like any other contract) are less than clear, the language in the preamble can held guide interpretation of the treaty terms.  Thus, this START treaty will have the effect of slowing or preventing entirely America’s use of a defensive anti-nuke shield. Debate over such a shield (in our book a unique laser system), and how it impacts the everyday lives of Americans  is at the core of what happens in our novel Edge of Apocalypse.  Speaking of preambles, it is important to remember that our Founding Fathers stated in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution that one of the reasons for establishing our form of government was to “provide for the common defense.”

How does Iran play into this? It was just announced that Iran will be loading enriched uranium into it’s Bushehr nuclear reactor. And it plans on building a dozen more nuclear facilities. Who is supplying the enriched uranium? None other than Russia, a fact that Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs admitted last Friday.  Such enriched nuclear fuel can be used for nuclear weapons, not just to provide electrity to its citizens as Iran claims.  So why would the Obama Administration give away U.S. security in the START treaty with Russia just as Russia is helping to develope Iran – an official state of terrorism – into a nuclear power? This entire scenario has a foreboding kinship to our new fiction series. With these most recent events, our End Series books are starting more and more to look like perilous fact.  

(c) 2010 Tim LaHaye and Craig Parshall

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Washington, DC   Ten days ago Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg delivered a speech at American University where she spoke openly about one of her favorite and most controversial positions – that our Supreme Court ought to make decisions about our own Constitution not just based on our own American legal values, but also based on ideas gleaned from other nations around the world.  This is a radial proposition,  one that (as we will see below) was vehementally rejected by our Founding Fathers. So when Justice Ginsburg tried to support her idea that our High Court should be influenced by and therefore subservient to, for example, the European courts or the human rights commissions of the United Nations, and did so by citing the Founders, she mistated the historical record dramatically.

In her speech, Justice Ginsburg defended her new Supreme Court colleague Elena Kagan, who was recently confirmed by the Senate. Kagan like Ginsburg, is an unabashed fan of global law.  Justice Ginsburg then quoted what the Founders said in The Federalist (the collection of essays written by the Founders in their successful effort to make the case for the adoption of our new federal Constitution) about the “high importance” of the “laws of nations …” in matter of commerce between nations. However, Justice Ginsburg failed to include the reference to Federalist paper Number 42, authored by James Madison, one of the chief architects of our Constitution. There, Madison made it crystal clear that foreign law should never be the source of American law unless the legislative branch (not the Supreme Court) expressly adopts it. Madison said: “But neither the common nor statute law of England or any other nation should be the standard [for America] unless already adopted by legislation in the United States.” Madison warned, using the example of defining “felonies on the high seas,” that adopting the laws of “other nations would be dishonorable and illegitimate.”

In our new futuristic novel, Edge of Apocalypse, we illustrate the tragic damage to our fundamental rights if our nation adopts the legal standards of the international community.  Our criticism of Elena Kagan’s fondness for the global law approach has earned us the contempt of groups like People for the American Way and Americans United for Seperation of Church and State.  See article “Misfire over Kagan” below. But what neither the radical secularists, nor Justice Ginsburg can dispute is that this new importation of foreign influence into our Constitution by fiat (the Supreme Court has done it in several cases now), as Justice Scalia has noted, would have “appalled” the Founders;  those men who risked their lives to birth our nation, and who then drafted the Constitution, our guiding legal document that continues to be mangled by our federal courts in their misinterpretation.

(c) 2010 Tim LaHaye and Craig Parshall

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WASHINGTON, DC   In the wake of the passage on July 21 of a massive, 2300 page law regulating American finance, the Obama Administration went one step further: calling on the nations of the world to pass comparable regulations in conjunction with America.  Lael Brainard, U.S. Undersecretary of the Treasury for International Affairs told a Senate subcommittee that financial standards around the world need to be “converged … by coordinating different approaches across nations.” He also called on Europe to “develop the most globally convergent financial protections the world has ever attempted.”

The new financial regulation law passed by Congress and signed by President Obama has a clear global agenda. In the words of the Denver Post, it creates a new federal “bureau to regulate instruments that link consumers to the world of global finance … and creates a council of regulators to scour the globe for dangers to the system and intervene before the risks get out of control.”  This will be the first time that the United States has formally created a protocol for coordinating our banking and financial systems with the nations of the world. 

In our new futuristic novel, Edge of Apocalypse, we take a look at this move toward a global economic system. In our story we fictionalize the move in Congress toward a one-word currency which we dubbed the CReDO. Yet this is far from fiction. A global form of currency called the Terra has been out for several years.  Its supporters boast that it “could play a significant role in getting the world out of recession.”  Apparently some folks in the world of politics are getting concerned about the movement toward world governance, whether in politics or economics.  In July the Nevada State Republican convention committee voted to pass a platform that states:  “we reject the concept of  global governance.”  For students of the Bible none of this will come as a surprise. In the book of Revelation, when mention is made of the future “Babylon” that will govern the world with a iron hand, repeated references are made to its centralized, global economic power:  “all the nations” will participate in the wickedness of this Bablyon and  “the merchants of the earth” will become “rich by the wealth of her sensuality” (18:3).  When God destroys this global Babylon the “merchants of the earth” and the “kings of the earth” who have become willing partners with this future global Babylon will weep and mourn bitterly over her downfall because they have banked everything on her promise of  financial stability and political power. (Rev. 18: 9 – 19).  Yet for the Christian, this future scenario does not strike them with fear.  Instead, those who have trusted in and personally received Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord look hopefully to His coming return and the establishment of His future kingdom.  Have you trusted Jesus yet ? If not, your soul is a dry and thirsty place.  But it doesn’t have to be. “And let the one who is thristy come; let the one who wishes take the water of life without cost.” (Rev. 22:17). Jesus said: “whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life.” John 4: 14.

(c) 2010  Tim LaHaye and Craig Parshall

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