THE BEAST SYSTEM IS BUILDING: RIGHT BEFORE OUR EYES! (from a segment of the Hal Lindsey Report June 21, 2013) The 13th chapter of the Book of Revelation is a masterpiece of brevity, drama, understatement, mystery and intrigue. In just 18 verses it gives volumes of information about the Bible’s most notorious characters – the antichrist and the false prophet, who are equals working together. “He causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or their foreheads, and that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the beast, or the number of his name” (Revelation 13:16-17). Imagine the technology necessary to so fully regulate buying and selling across the entire planet. Revelation pictures a world government controlling all commerce from the smallest transaction to the largest. There are many ideas on what the mark might be, which I’ve discussed many times previously. But let’s focus on the amazing technology needed for the mark to do what the Bible is describing. First there will need to be a digital communications grid in place all around the world. In just the last few years, billions of dollars have gone into building just such a grid. According to the International Telecommunications Union, in a single year – 2005 – eight billion dollars was invested in communications infrastructure on the continent of Africa alone! Mobile broadband is spreading quickly among even Aboriginal peoples previously untouched by the modern world. You see, the antichrist government needs maximum connectedness to fulfill what the Bible predicts. The antichrist will also need central processing centers of almost unthinkable power and scope, such as the NSA’s (National Security Agency’s) new Utah Data Center at a cost of around two billion dollars. The facility will cover a million square feet. Data will be stored in four 25,000 square foot buildings. When people in Utah first heard of the project, they expected a bonanza of permanent new jobs. But the government facility will house relatively few occupants. It’s mostly a place for computers. The cost of storing data keeps going down for all of us. That’s also true for the NSA. Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive said, “If one had the opportunity to collect all the voice traffic in the U.S., it would cost less than the Pentagon spends on paper clips. Storage these days is trivial; it’s not a problem.” Well; there is one problem. These levels of storage use an awful lot of electricity. The Utah Data Center has its own 65 megawatt substation. That’s enough to power a small city. Electricity alone will cost 40 million dollars a year. But the real story here is in just how much data the NSA plans to store. Early this year the Kingston Company announced a new one terabyte thumb drive - in other words, on a flash storage unit smaller than your thumb they can now fit a terabyte of data. We hear these words so much that they lose their meaning. So let’s try to picture it: Plain text data typed on a page can be stored at a rate of 256,000 pages per megabyte. That means a megabyte text fills a stack of paper 85 feet tall. But a terabyte is a million times larger than a megabyte. That means that you can store on one thumb drive the equivalent of a stack of paper more than 16,000 miles high. This is astronomical! The International Space Station orbits about 240 miles above the earth. Our stack of paper would be 67 times higher – all of it stored on a space smaller than your thumb. If modern technology allows us to put that kind of data in such a small space, what can they do with hundreds of thousands of square feet? Mitre Corporation, a Pentagon Think Tank, has projected that “the NSA Utah facility could potentially increase to the level of yottabytes by 2015.” Now, unless you’re a computer geek, you may have never heard of a yottabyte. It’s the largest measure of digital data we have yet named. In order to appreciate a yottabyte, let’s look at a smaller measurement of digital data – the Exabyte. In 1986 the entire world’s capacity to store data was about 2.6 exabytes. By 2000 it had risen to 55 exabytes. By 2007 the combined storage capacity of all the world’s computers reached 295 exabytes. But compared to a yottabyte that’s nearly nothing! It takes a million exabytes to equal one yottabyte! And we’re talking about yottabytes PLURAL for just this one NSA facility – and the NSA has others. The Texas Cryptology Center is located near Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. That facility has a total of 1.3 million square feet. The storage capacity in Texas? It’s top secret. Neither do we know the capability of the NSA facility at Fort Meade in Maryland. But government reports indicate they they already use more electricity than the new Utah facility will. Massive use of electricity usually means massive use of computer power – mostly data storage. In 2009 the NSA placed in the Federal register a 20-year plan to build 5.8 million square feet of new working and storage space at Fort Meade. Obviously any government needs intelligence operations. We can’t expect our leaders to know what’s going on around the world by reading press releases from various capitals or terror groups. But what they’re doing at the NSA goes FAR BEYOND NORMAL SPYING. ANTICHRIST TECHNOLOGY These kinds of data storage capabilities allow in depth knowledge of every activity of every person on the face of the earth! How high would one yottabyte stack of paper go? – over 16 quadrillion miles tall – more than 3 light years high! Why does the NSA need so much capacity? And what do they intend to put in there? According to the CIA – EVERYTHING. Ira Hunt, the CIA’s chief technology officer, recently said, “We fundamentally try to collect everything and hang on to it forever.” Everything? Forever? Those are very big words. Hunt went on to say, “Cell phones, smart houses, satellite sensors and countless other services are creating huge amounts of information.” Hunt had the good sense to warn his audience about privacy concerns, saying “Technology is moving faster than the government or law can keep up. It’s moving faster, I would argue, than you can keep up. You should be asking the questions: what are your rights? and who owns your data?” The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees the following: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no Warrant shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched and the person or things to be seized.” I see no room in that for the collection of metadata, do you? If the government wants to search persons, houses, papers or effects, it must go before a magistrate and affirm under oath the particulars of the case, including “…probable cause…the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” Without the Fourth Amendment, among others, the America we love would decline into a police state. As recent revelations have shown, IT’S ALREADY FALLEN A LONG, LONG WAY. But as we accelerate to the end of this age and catastrophes increase exponentially, the cry for peace and safety will dominate the world’s concerns. As time passes and tragedies befall us, the cry for peace and safety will grow more acute. Peace and safety will trump those things that have made America great. “For when they say, “Peace and safety!” then sudden destruction comes upon them, as labor pains upon a pregnant woman. And they shall not escape” (1 Thessalonians 5:3). The antichrist will find a world willing, even begging to exchange formerly precious things like the Bill of Rights for a bill of goods he’ll be selling. The apocalypse predicts the thinking of the unbelieving world as they worship the antichrist: “…they also worshipped the beast and asked, “Who is like the beast? Who is able to make war with him?” (Revelation 13:4b). You see, they’ve traded their freedom and souls for the promise of security. The antichrist and his cohort, the false prophet, will find a vast technological infrastructure already built and waiting, with which they will control the world. Amazingly, the NSA and their other agencies in countries around the world are being compelled to build facilities they don’t need and for reasons they don’t really understand. But…waiting in the wings stands one who is about to be unveiled. He will know EXACTLY what to do with them! The Bible talks about times and seasons and talks about ages past, ages present, and ages to come because God’s outline of history is divided into ages – the age where Israel was set aside because they rejected Jesus as the Messiah started a new age where God emphasized the Gentiles in His program. And yet He is not through with Israel. He says, “I do not want you, brethren, to be uninformed of this mystery – so that you will not be wise in your own instruction, that a partial hardening has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in” (Romans 11:25). The phrase “until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in” means the full number of Gentiles that have put their trust in Christ and have been saved. I believe we are VERY near that “until” when Israel is back under God’s favor again. Because, there is a time coming when the full number (which only God knows) of Gentiles will have been saved. And there’s a point when the last Gentile who has put his faith in Christ as his Savior will come in, and that will fill out the whole number that are to be saved. The minute that last Gentile places his faith in Christ, we are going to be caught up in a flash – in the blink of an eye – up to meet Christ in the air, changed from mortal to immortal, and made into the image of Christ. If you haven’t put your faith in Jesus Christ – if you haven’t received the gift of pardon that He gave His life to pay for – do it now. Never has there been such obvious fulfillment of key prophecies about this time than we see before us right now. Put your faith in Christ by simply saying, “Thank you, Lord Jesus, for dying for me. I receive the pardon You paid for. Make me what you want me to be.” With such amazing fulfillments of prophecies as we’ve talked about here, I’m a little somber. So, I just simply say, “God bless you, and God willing I may be back next week.” Hal Lindsey
Posted on: Sun, 23 Jun 2013 01:49:12 +0000
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