The afternoon before Hurricane Rita hit the Gulf Coast—and was still being hyped up on cable news as something of "biblical proportions"—I had a chance conversation with an investment banker from Goldman Sachs who told me he had just left an all-day in-house conference in which the last item on the agenda was the avian influenza virus. The conference speaker, he said, warned that a pandemic was a "virtual certainty" and could result in 33 million deaths worldwide.

When you think of the possibilities, well, it's just too much to grasp, even with the World Trade Center, Iraq, tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, etc. now tattooed on our psyches.

This past spring I attended a weekend conference at my church in the Chicago suburb Rolling Meadows, Shorewood Bible Church, in which my pastor, Richard Jordan, once again reminded everyone that our country has entered another "winter" cycle.

I wrote about this phenomenon a year ago (scroll down to "In the Midst of Winter," Sept. 2, 2004), but to repeat its basic thrust, nations—similar to individuals—go through life cycles of spring, summer, fall and winter.

Previous American "winters," my pastor explained, have coincided with major events in history such as the American Revolution, Civil War and Great Depression. They were marked by specific incidents such as the Boston Tea Party, the election of Abraham Lincoln and the stock market crash.

Among the characteristics of wintertime are political realignment, fundamental economic change, a shift in the nation's psyche and a willingness among citizens to coalesce and make private sacrifice.

It's a time when good and evil become very identifiable. Also, attitudes about God and biblical truth are examined.

Just yesterday I came across this quote on a Christian website, taken from the book, "The Post-Capitalist Society," by Peter Drucker:

"Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation.... Within a few short decades, society rearranges itself—it's worldview; its basic values: its social and political structures; its arts; its key institutions. Fifty years later, there is a new world. And the people born then cannot even imagine the world in which their grandparents lived. . .We are currently living through just such a transformation. It is creating the post-capitalist society. . . "

The same website had an article on the growing apostasy inside Christian churches that stated,

"Mega- churches in America have become absurd to the point where satire is almost impossible. Starbucks franchises and Christian tattoo parlors are now on church property. Rappers, hula praise dancers, contortionists, acupuncturists, liposuctionists, the side show of evangelicalism has an ever expanding cast of performers. The future of evangelicalism is here and it comes as an Elvis impersonator. Worse, in a quest for what's real, false teaching is entering through the traditions of the East, like meditation and yoga in the new Emergent church movement."

Addressing this same issue in a recent sermon, my pastor mentioned a Unitarian church songbook that actually had as a song's chorus, "Prosperity, prosperity, prosperity now."

"You look at that and you think, 'Wow, can anything be any hokier than some of the stuff you hear in religion?' " Jordan said. "And it is that way. Religion is a strange thing and when you make a religion out of Christianity it isn't much saner than all the other religions of the world. Actually it's worse, frankly, because it's just parodying His truth when it ought to be truth.

"If you took the Vedas and you read them, you wouldn't think they were God's Word. I've read them. You read the Koran and you've got to have some religious bias and prejudice to think the Koran is the Word of God. I've read it. I sat down and read it four times and I decided that was enough. But you read it and you just know, 'That can't be God's Word.' Well, people read the Bible, and if you do read the Bible, all of a sudden you realize there's something different about this Book. The reason people don't know this is they don't read it. The really don't. They don't read it at all, they just read books about it or hear people talk about it, and they'd rather listen to Rush (Limbaugh), or if you're really whacko, Michael Savage, than read the Bible."

A book I have on Islam and the Muslim faith has a quote from Scottish scholar Thomas Carlyle, who once said of the Koran, "It is a toilsome reading as I ever undertook, a wearisome, confused jumble, crude, incondite. Nothing but a sense of duty could carry any European through the Koran."

In Halley's Bible Handbook, once an American family bookshelf staple that has been updated more than 20 times since it was first published in 1927, Carlyle is quoted saying: "The Bible is the truest utterance that ever came by alphabetic letters from the soul of man, through which, as through a window divinely opened, all men can look into the stillness of eternity, and discern in glimpses their far-distant, long-forgotten home."

On the Book of Job alone, Carlyle said, "I call this book, apart from all theories about it, one of the Grandest things ever written. Our first, oldest statement of the never-ending problem: Man's Destiny, and God's Ways with him in the earth. There is nothing written, I think, of equal literary merit."

People forget that Satan is one of the greatest students of the Bible and that's how he's been so effective through the ages in counterfeiting what God's doing. As my pastor reminds, "Satan's not working down at the local beer parlors or off-track betting facilities—he's in places with steeples."

That's where he pulls his dirtiest tricks today, transforming himself into "an angel of light," or a source of divine revelations, in order to deceive, warns the Apostle Paul. (II Cor. 11:14)

His tactic is to have his ministers preach according to the prophetic program given Israel, deceiving Christians into believing they are "spiritual Jews" who are to claim for themselves passages given specifically to the nation Israel in a different dispensation separate from the Apostle Paul's distinct gospel to Jews and Gentiles alike in this current dispensation of grace.

In 1535, Miles Coverdale, in his introduction to his Bible translation, instructed, "It will greatly help you to understand Scripture if you note—not only what is spoken and written, but of whom and to whom, with what words, at what time, where, to what intent, with what circumstances, considering what goes before and what follows."

As Paul makes clear in I Thess. 2:3, the "day of Christ," or the Rapture, "shall not come except there come a falling away first." This is a reference to the pervasive biblical ignorance and deception achieved through apostate churches. This is what we have now and it's only going to get worse. Batten down the hatches.