Racing Toward the New World Order
Like many other cultural observers, I have been tracking the movement toward a global society. For me, this study has spanned three decades. One of my first wake-up calls was when I started examining public school social-studies curricula with my wife, Janet. We were concerned about the materials used in some of our children’s classrooms. We soon discovered an aggressive movement afoot to devalue the notion of national sovereignty and teach American children to view themselves as “global citizens.”
A source of this educational movement (there were actually many back then) was a group called Beyond War. It just happened to be holding a conference in a large city near us, so we attended. The theme was conflict resolution, something most Christians would consider a worthy mission. The problem, though, came not in the grand theme of the idea, but in the implementing strategy.
It soon became clear that the conference blamed much of our world’s “conflicts” on two root causes: (1) unhealthy nationalism and (2) religious orthodoxy, particularly the conservative-Christian brand. The cure was simple: teach the next generation to become more global in its thinking and less national and identify any form of rigid or absolute religious belief as an enemy of peace.
Sometime later I was asked by a state legislator to testify against a bill that would have required every student in our state to be taught “global peace education.” I did so happily. But though that radical proposal was defeated, the philosophical movement behind it persists.
The Present Reality of the Global State
Proponents of a global society use the term critical mass, borrowed from nuclear physics where it means the smallest amount of fissile nuclear material necessary to begin an unstoppable nuclear chain reaction. But in the world of social movements, it means something slightly different: the minimum support needed to begin an unstoppable, new, global, social order. To proponents, there is nothing sinister about it. It is simply a matter of using the strategies of political power and social pressure to transform the future.
What is their vision of the future? It is one where individual nations, America included, would be increasingly second-tier players under the shadow of a unified world community.
The future dreamed of by the globalists of the 1980s has become our present. New world order is a common phrase among international leaders. Discussion of a single, global currency is now commonplace. By all objective measurements, we are truly nearing the “critical mass” of events necessary to catapult us all into a new, unified world system.
One aspect is most certainly financial. The collapse of current markets, along with the tremendous weakening of national economies, has caused the coalition of nations in the Group of 20 (G-20) to universally agree to implement global financial controls. (See “G-20 and Beyond: The Push for Global Finance,”) These worldwide controls will most certainly be enforced by a single global agency.
Then there is the currency issue. On April 3, 2009, the Telegraph.co.uk led with this headline: “The G20 moves the world a step closer to a global currency.” The article explained the movement toward a unified, worldwide form of money this way:
A single clause in Point 19 of the communiqué issued by the G20 leaders amounts to revolution in the global financial order.
“We have agreed to support a general SDR allocation which will inject $250bn (£170bn) into the world economy and increase global liquidity,” it said. SDRs are Special Drawing Rights, a synthetic paper currency issued by the International Monetary Fund that has lain dormant for half a century.1
The second form of globalization emerging before our eyes is political. John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has warned Americans the Obama administration’s current direction risks violating the most fundamental ideas in our Constitution because it seeks to make the United States subservient to a global system of decision-making.2 This trend is best exemplified by examining the people who may soon be directing America’s foreign policy.
President Barack Obama picked the head of the Yale Law School, Harold Hongju Koh, to be the new legal counsel to the U.S. State Department. He is now the chief interpreter of legal relations between America and the rest of the world.
However, Mr. Koh has an extremely radical idea of American national sovereignty. He has criticized the United States for “failing to obey global norms” and called America hypocritical because, under President George W. Bush, we refused to join the alarmingly globalistic International Criminal Court.3 That international legal tribunal has been touted as having world-wide jurisdiction over every nation on the globe. If the United States signs on to it, that court will have authority to put Pentagon generals on trial for “war crimes” whenever it disagrees with American military policy.
This brings us to the third aspect of the current rush toward a new global state: the legal arena. American courts are absorbing international law into their legal fabric. I first noticed this trend in a series of death-penalty cases that had reached the U.S. Supreme Court. The cases involved foreign defendants who had committed heinous murders on U.S. soil.
The defendants argued that American courts needed to heed international treaties, even if those treaties compromised the criminal laws of individual American states. Although the majority of Supreme Court justices rejected those arguments, liberals on the Court, like Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, thought such points had merit. A few years later, we see this minority view of interpreting the Constitution based on international law has crept into the thinking of the majority. In Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down laws that criminalized homosexual conduct, the majority opinion authored by Justice Anthony Kennedy liberally cited cases from international tribunals and foreign courts to support the majority’s radical and flawed interpretation of the U.S. Constitution.
If the current trajectory holds, America’s most cherished constitutional values will soon be eclipsed by the shadow of an overarching, global, legal standard that will lack any of the Judeo-Christian presuppositions or biblical literacy that gave birth to America.
The Poisonous Fruit of the Future World Order
The book of Revelation promises a future global kingdom, the impressive but ultimately frightening appearance of which will presage the end of the age and the coming of Christ the Lord.
Revelation 17—18 speaks of a great “Babylon,” whose reign over the earth will seem complete and utterly invincible. But this wondrous and monstrous world system, inspired and orchestrated by Satan, will have feet of clay. God will destroy it, along with the Evil One and his emissaries, compatriots, and sympathizers. The Lord will establish His Kingdom and a new heaven and new earth. Thus, like the failed city of Nimrod in the Old Testament, this “great city Babylon” will also fall (18:10).
This future, world-centric Babylon will have three aspects: it will be the center of a false world religion; it will possess political control over all other nations; and it will exercise a global, commercial monopoly unparalleled in human history.4
The foundation stones of all three aspects are being laid, even as you read this article.
The religious Babylon of the future global state will present a positive face to the world; but, in reality, it will become “a dwelling place of demons, a prison for every foul spirit” (v. 2).
Political Babylon will seduce the world, causing “all the nations [to] have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication,” and “the kings of the earth [to] have committed fornication with her” (v. 3).
Economic Babylon will be particularly powerful and pernicious, inducing “the merchants of the earth [to] have become rich through the abundance of her luxury” (v. 3).
But God will triumph. While a grief-stricken world cries, “Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen” (v. 2), in heaven there will be shouts of “Alleluia! Salvation and glory and honor and power belong to the Lord our God! For true and righteous are His judgments” (19:1–2).
The future followers of this one-world system will be unable to discern what is “true and righteous” because they will have rejected the Author of all truth and all righteousness, as well as His Son, the King of kings and Lord of lords.
The Task Ahead
All these things could seem overwhelming. You may be asking yourself, How could I, just one follower of Christ, have any significant role in events so monumental and vast? But you can.
If you are an American, you still live in a nation of laws and relative freedom, especially compared to many other countries around the world. America has been given a representative form of government as a stewardship from God. We dare not take it for granted or neglect our duty of citizenship. We must lift our voices in opposition to those who cry for global government and a one-world economy. Although we know that, at the end of the age, it will come to pass because God has told us so, this knowledge does not mean we should be accomplices in its appearing. In telling us about Nimrod and his failure to unite the world and build the Tower of Babel (Gen. 11:1–9), God has shared His mind with us on the benefits of national sovereignty and the dangers of a single, global center of power. In the New Testament we see the same principle when the apostle Paul addressed the same issue as he preached before the philosophical elite on Mars Hill in Athens. Paul pointed out that the Lord’s design for individual nation-states is tied to His plan for men and women to come to a saving knowledge of Him:
And He [God] has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings, so that they should seek the Lord (Acts 17: 26–27).
In addition, we should remember the biblical basics. When Paul wrote his second epistle to Christian believers in Thessalonica, he reminded them of events that will mark the end of the age and the promise of Christ’s coming. And he instructed them to focus their prayers on two essentials:
Finally brethren, pray for us, that the word of the Lord may run swiftly and be glorified…and that we may be delivered from unreasonable and wicked men; for not all have faith (2 Th. 3:1–2).
Isn’t God’s Word so wonderfully practical? Let us, therefore, pray for the spread of the gospel of Jesus Christ and that, individually and as a nation, we will be rescued from the plans of those whose failed and fallen philosophies would take us dangerously far from God’s sovereign plan for national governance and shipwreck us on the rocks of a global, false utopia.
ENDNOTES
- Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, “The G20 moves the world a step closer to a global currency,” April 3, 2009 <telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/5096524/The-G20-moves-the-world-a-step-closer-to-a-global-currency.html>.
- John Bolton, “The Coming War on Sovereignty,” March 2009 <commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/the-coming-war-on-sovereignty-15080>.
- John Fonte, “Transnational Progressive Nominated as Legal Advisor for State,” March 24, 2009 <corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MDBhMDk5NzFkZGIwMDI0ZDM3ZDQzYzBjNTk1ODg0YmQ=>.
- Tim LaHaye et. al., eds., Tim LaHaye Prophecy Study Bible (Chattanooga, TN: AMG Publishers, 2000), 1393–1396.
