Are you enslaved or troubled by a habitual use of various narcotic, stimulant or mind-influencing drugs (including alcohol)? Do you have symptoms of physical, emotional or mental addiction? You may not have a sickness, but a sin problem which causes enslavement and sickness.

Jesus Christ has done something about your problem. He came to liberate you from such problems and enable you to gain self-control, a fruit of the Holy Spirit (Galatians 5:22,23).

Our nation has been shocked in recent months by extreme abortion laws that seem to be hitting us one after the other, starting with New York passing a sweeping abortion law that loosened the requirement for who can be an abortionist, removed protections for unborn babies involved in violent crimes, and allowed abortions through all nine months of pregnancy.

Days later, the governor of Virginia talked about a bill that was in committee, and then calmly discussed how a survivor of a late-term abortion could be killed if the mother and doctor agreed. Then Senator Ben Sasse fast-tracked a bill protecting babies born alive during late-term abortions, saying that all US senators should be able to go on record against infanticide. It was shut down and continues to be.

 As Christians, who believe that God creates each human being — born or unborn — in his image, with the right to be protected, these swift events can be overwhelming. What can an ordinary Christian do in the face of so much evil? 

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What do the Hebrew prophets have to say to us in these days of noisy and fascinatingly unpredictable politics? The 8th-century BCE religious geniuses whom we know as Amos, Hosea, Micah, and Isaiah had a brand in common, a phrase that would fit on a bumper sticker: mishpat u-tzedeqah, “justice and righteousness.”

Singly, these are cardinal virtues: “justice,” doing what’s fair, and “righteousness,” doing what’s right. Occasionally they could clash, as the early-bird workers in Jesus’ parable about the vineyard would tell you (Matthew 20:1-16). Though each word has its own depths, what is most interesting is their conjunction:

The political platform of these Classical Hebrew prophets emphasized the conjunction – “justice and righteousness,” a phrase that means “care for the poor,” as Israeli biblical scholar Moshe Weinfeld argues. For the prophets, the truest measure of societal health was, as their inspired heir put it in Matthew 25:45, the way it treated “the least of these,” the widow, the stranger, the orphan, the prisoner, the disabled. In the words of Abraham Joshua Heschel, the prophet registered “the secret obscenity of sheer unfairness, the unnoticed malignancy of established patterns of indifference. … The prophet’s ear perceive[d] the silent sigh.

 The name of Jesus is so powerful that ignorance of it is robbing many of God’s blessings and fulfillment in life. The enemy will do anything to keep man in the dark so that he can continue to oppress him. The truth is that the power in the name of Jesus brings deliverance from all oppression of the devil and delivers dominion to mankind. 

NDE's: Are they real?