Prayer And Fasting
By Malcolm E Baker

It has been interesting to note that many others are hearing the call of the Lord to seek His face in prayer and fasting. As much as anything it is a call to return to the Lord, the Lord of Scripture, the very One Who is the same today, yesterday and forever. He is unchanging and His Word is unchanging. The tsunami on God’s Word and character today seeks to destroy all that is lovely and true which includes, truth, righteousness and justice. Holiness unto the Lord is mocked and replaced with the worship of man and mammon. The power and the glory of the Lord are replaced with the power of money, sex and violence. Chaos is the order of the day, as God’s law is despised and rejected even as the Saviour was despised and rejected two thousand years ago. The Lord is calling His people to be holy even as He is holy and to be separate, overcoming the world with its pleasures and temptations.

The world and everything that can be shaken is being shaken. The unity that is happening in the world as nations, peoples and religions come together is a unity that separates and divides. It separates and divides man from his Maker, the Living God. It is a unity that will perish because it is the unity of rebellion against God.

Prayer and fasting under the guidance of the Holy Spirit is a necessary discipline for the Church today. What alarms me is the call by some that has gone out. The call has good intentions but is it of the Spirit, or is it a call of the flesh to enhance ones ministry? The call says that we are fasting on such and such a day at such a time, and we invite you to join us. It is to do with “us” and “our” ministry. I was tempted to put out the same call myself, but having meditated on it I came to the conclusion that this was not of God, and so we are calling people to fast and pray seeking God in their own homes and fellowships as to how, when and where they should fast. We urge believers to seek the Lord and follow Him and not to get caught up in how others are being led. Joining together may come at a later date when the Church has learned again to hear His voice and to know Him. Jesus is the Good Shepherd and it is Him that we must follow. Returning to the Scriptures seeking first the Kingdom and His righteousness under the ministry of the Holy Spirit we will learn again how to recognise the Master’s voice and whether a certain call is from Him or from some other source.

Holocaust Remembrance Day:

Snow covered grounds and buildings at the former Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp on the eve of the commemoration of its liberation in 1945.

At the end of January people took time out to remember the holocaust. This period of world history revealed in horrific detail the wickedness of the heart of man. I well remember as a lad sitting watching the reports and programmes on TV along with my mother and other members of the family, and seeing the poor wretches in the concentration camps; the bodies of lifeless, hopeless skin and bone. We saw the guards and those responsible for planning and carrying out the atrocities against the Jews and other groups – gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally ill and retarded, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Christians that took a stand against the evil of the day. It still causes a great heaviness in my heart today when I dwell on these things and remember the graphic scenes. One report concerned experimentation on children and how the doctor explained that after the first experiment it became easy. I remember a Jewish child who was conscious while the doctor drilled into his head to carry out experiments on his brain, and the child screaming in terror, “what are you doing to me?” What are you doing to me?”

While we remember, I hope we take time to remember God. I hope we take time to meditate and consider what was going on in the Father’s heart at this time. Those of us that have had, or have children know that there are times when you must allow things to come into your child’s life that you would rather not – that you would like to step in and alter. But you know too that to do so would be a selfish act. That by stepping into a situation to seek to end your child’s suffering you are really only seeking to bring an end to the hurt and suffering in your own heart – and so you are acting out of selfishness and not love. If God had stepped into the holocaust and stopped it, it would have been to bring an end to His own suffering more than it would have been to alleviate the suffering of His children. It would have been an act of selfishness. My own heart is so sorrowful as I reflect on this and consider the suffering we cause our Father. Our people, our MP’s, our Government condemned a young prince recently for wearing a Nazi uniform to a party, while at the same time sitting back and accepting Nazi doctrine and practice in allowing laws that abort the unborn, flushing them down the nations toilets, destroying those that we claim to be less than human. We bring in the concept and practice of euthanasia into our European brotherhood of all for one and one for all. Killing! Killing! Killing! – BUT – save the environment at all costs! Laws are brought in by the EU to fine people thousands of pounds for not putting the right rubbish in the right plastic bags, being careful with rubbish and careless with human life! The thief/Beast comes to kill, steal and destroy. Then we have recently seen posters produced and displayed by the Labour Party with the heads of Michael Howard and Oliver Letwin superimposed on the bodies of pigs with wings. A further poster depicted Mr Howard as a sinister, grasping figure leering in front of a slogan saying ‘ I can spend the same money twice and swinging a watch on a chain.’ Mr Howard is a Jew. “Britain was moved by the remembrance ceremony at Auschwitz; yet only a few hours later, Labour’s offensive posters displayed the very prejudice that had led all the way to that terrible place.” (Melanie Phillips). Can we cry out with David in Psalm 38 or are our hearts so calloused it will require major surgery to bring reconciliation to our Lord and our God?

Government guidance about the proposed incitement to religious hatred law states, 'Christians claiming Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, the life and the only way to God' could be a crime if their words were considered 'insulting' and it was a 'likely effect that hatred would be stirred up'.

The Government’s stance on this matter would lead to their greatest mistake of all time as they willingly and knowingly stand against the truth of God’s Word. It would undoubtedly lead to trouble for Christians if this becomes law, but it will also lead to a boldness in Christians that this nation has not seen for centuries! And what happens in those situations where solicitors and courts ask people to swear on the Holy Bible – will they swear and then add….. “Except for John 14:6 of God’s Holy Word”?

The old year ended and the New Year began with the loss of life.

Once more the inhabitants of the earth have been reminded of our frailty, fragility and dependence upon God for our very existence. But do we heed the warning signs that are going out into the earth. Do we turn from our wicked ways and do we seek and turn to God?

Set out below are details from various sources and reports concerning the recent tsunami. The earth has been shaken but I fear man’s confidence in himself has not.

The Worlds Largest Earthquake In 40 Years

After a major earthquake, the whole world resonates like a bell that has been struck. It lasts for several hours after the main shock. But what’s more intriguing is that a big piece of the planet’s mass has been moved around. This actually altered the axis of the earth’s rotation.

The 1960 earthquake (that registered 9.5 on the Richter scale) in Chile did the same. The 1964 earthquake (a 9.2 on the Richter scale) in Alaska, too. And both created tsunamis.

This quake was more powerful than an atomic bomb. It has been calculated that the energy released on Sunday Dec 26th 2004 was 23,000 times that of the explosion of the nuclear bomb at Hiroshima (Japan). A large portion of the earth’s crust—1,000 km (620 miles) in length by 100 km (62 miles) in width running from Western Sumatra to Myanmar—moved. Sumatra is thought to have moved by as much as 120ft and the Earth to have shifted on its axis. Geophysicists are calling it a megathrust, the term used for the most powerful of changes in the Earth’s surface. Pressure built up over nearly two centuries was released in a single snap.

“That earthquake has changed the map,” Ken Hudnut, of the US Geological Survey (USGS), said. “Based on seismic modelling, some of the smaller islands off the southwest coast of Sumatra may have moved to the southwest by about 20 metres. That is a lot of slip.”

Geophysicists are not yet sure just how far the land moved. Stuart Sipkin, of the USGS National Earthquake Information Centre in Golden, Colorado, believes that it is more likely that the islands off Sumatra had risen higher out of the sea, rather than moving laterally. “In this case the Indian plate dived below the Burma plate causing uplift, so most of the motion to the islands would have been vertical, not horizontal,” he said.

The seismologist Hiroo Kanamori, of Caltech, said that the quake would probably have affected the Earth’s rotation and the regular wobble of its axis. “The question is how much and can it be detected,” he said.

This earthquake was so much bigger than others have been. The Bam earthquake in Iran a year ago that destroyed a very vulnerable city (and killed more than 26,000) was much smaller. But this earthquake will not be famous for the shaking, it will be known for the tsunami, which is pretty unusual.

The risks of tsunamis have been greatly underestimated. A tsunami can travel 3,000 or 5,000 km (1,900-3,000 miles), in this case to regions like Somalia where people died on the beach because they had no idea that there had even been an earthquake. This is something that people will have to face in the next few years.

In the open ocean a tsunami wave can travel as fast as 800 kilometres (500 miles) per hour—like a commercial airplane—so it took two or three hours.

Could we see another huge earthquake in the near future? One expert, geologist Gianluca Valensise of the Italian Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology said – This was so large that it consumed all of the stored energy in the area. We are recording aftershocks, but no one is expecting another humongous one.

Britain had its own big waves – 400 years ago

Atlantic tsunami created our greatest environmental disaster, and it could happen again.

Could a huge wave swamp Britain? Almost certainly. Historical evidence suggests that it has happened in the past.

At 9am on January 20, 1607, there occurred along the shores of the Bristol Channel the greatest environmental disaster in British history.

According to the few witnesses who survived, “one or more mighty hills of water” swept over the sea defences and “running with a swiftness so incredible as that no greyhound could have escaped by running before them” swept over the flat hinterlands of more than 20 parishes. Thousands of people were drowned, houses and villages swept away, farmland inundated, flocks overwhelmed and the development of Cardiff and the surrounding region set back for more than a century.

No one can be absolutely certain that it was a tsunami, but the conditions suggest so. The sky was blue, the tide was high, there is a secondhand report of an earth tremor felt earlier that morning. It all fits together.

Much of our archival evidence comes from God’s warning to the people of England by the great overflowing of the waters or floods, a 12-page pamphlet printed in London in 1607. The innocent folk of Cardiff, the writer states, on a bright day in January 1607 “might see and perceive a far off, as it were in the element, huge and mighty hilles of water, tumbling one ouer another, in such sort, as of the greatest mountains in the world had ouer-whelmed the lowe valeyes or marshy grounds.”

On the Welsh side, the devastation stretched from Laugharne in Carmarthenshire to above Chepstow on the English border. There remain plaques up to 8ft above sea level to show how high the waters rose on the sides of surviving churches. At St Mary’s Church in the centre of Cardiff, some walls fell and the corpses were washed out of the graveyard.

Survivors clung to the steeples of churches and to the roofs of the few buildings that remained standing. One woman saved her young children, it is said, by putting them into an empty trough and floating with them to safety.

The Atlantic is not surrounded by the subduction zones that regularly generate tsunamis in the Pacific and, less often, the Indian Ocean but devastating tsunamis do occur here too. Earthquakes can set off monstrous submarine landslides in which tens of cubic kilometres of sediment perched unstably at the edges of the continental shelf plunge down into the abyss at 500km an hour.

We have studied the problem of saving the population of Cardiff, probably one of the cities on Earth most at risk from tsunamis. The majority can be saved simply by walking to the nearest high ground. For those who cannot, there should be designated tsunami shelters, which need be no more than overhead car parks. The rushing waters can pass underneath, and with no sidewalls to feel the pressure they should withstand almost any conceivable event.

There has to be a proper evacuation plan, the citizens need to know what it is, and there has to be a rehearsal from time to time. Buildings can be protected by a stout sea wall, not necessarily very high.

Whether it is worth taking the trouble depends where you live, and how often dangerous tsunamis occur. In low-lying cities such as Cardiff, London, Lisbon and Amsterdam the risk is not negligible. If the 1607 event was a tsunami, then a resident of Cardiff, for instance, is ten times as likely to be killed by a tsunami as by a road accident.

The last major earthquake in the UK was in the Dover Straits in 1580. The reason for this is that seismic activity tends to occur on the boundaries between the Earth’s great tectonic plates. Our nearest boundary is the North Atlantic Ridge, which slices through Iceland and continues southwards cutting the Atlantic Basin in two.

Even so, the UK still needs a tsunami warning system to protect it’s shores, because a mass of rock the size of the Isle of Man is slowly creeping down the western flank of the Cumbre Vieja volcano on the Canary Island of La Palma.

A future eruption, which could occur at any time in the next 1000 years, will send this gigantic landslide crashing into the North Atlantic. Resulting tsunamis more than 300ft high will devastate the neighbouring Canary Islands, and four or five hours later waves as large as those that struck India and Sri Lanka will close in on the South Coast of the UK. A few hours after that, waves up to 60ft high will batter the eastern seaboard of North America.

The most exposed parts of Britain will be the Scilly Isles and the southern coast of England. The most recent major earthquakes triggered tsunami in the Atlantic – obliterating the Portuguese capital Lisbon in 1755, claiming 75,000 lives. Further tidal waves by the quake battered southern Spain and North Africa and caused widespread damage in the Caribbean. The UK needs to take note. Source: Pointers Magazine Feb 2005