Watchman Categories
White Horse
Red Horse
Black Horse
Pale Horse
Heavenly Signs
Perilous Times
Christian Persecution
Warning
Watching
Good News
New articles are generally posted on Friday evenings.
THE FAITHFUL WATCHMAN CHRONICLES THE RIDE OF THE FOUR HORSEMEN
In Revelation 1:10 The Apostle John states that he was “in the spirit on the Lord’s day (the day of the Lord).” Revelation 1:19 states, “Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter.” Therefore, the seven seals which are opened in Revelation occur in the day of the Lord.
The first four seals are commonly referred to as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The Faithful Watchman chronicles the ride of these horsemen as an educational service for the public and a warning for those who have ears to hear (Rev. 2:7).
The Church of God’s Faithful can prove that the day of the Lord has begun. For more information about The Day of the Lord and the ride of the Four Horsemen visit our website at setapartbytruth.org.
Understanding the Watchman Categories
The Faithful Watchman follows world events in light of the warnings and prophecies found in the Bible. The categories below help readers understand why certain events deserve our attention.
These reports are intended to help us watch and consider world conditions. An event placed in a biblical category is not, by itself, proof that a specific prophecy has been fulfilled.
White Horse
Revelation 6:1–2; Matthew 24:4–5, 11
The first horseman rides a white horse and carries a bow. Jesus Christ warned that false prophets and religious deception would lead many people astray. This category follows religious movements, false teachings, and efforts to deceive people in matters of faith.
Red Horse
Revelation 6:3–4; Matthew 24:6–7
The second horseman rides a red horse and is given power to take peace from the earth. This category follows wars, armed conflicts, military threats, and growing tensions between nations that could lead to bloodshed.
Black Horse
Revelation 6:5–6; Matthew 24:7
The third horseman rides a black horse and carries a pair of balances. The Bible describes high prices for basic food. This category follows famine, food shortages, rising food costs, and economic troubles that make it difficult for people to meet their basic needs.
Pale Horse
Revelation 6:7–8; Matthew 24:7; Luke 21:11
The fourth horseman rides a pale horse, and his name is Death. This category follows deadly diseases, widespread outbreaks, disasters, and other conditions that threaten large numbers of lives.
Heavenly Signs
Luke 21:25–26; Matthew 24:29; Revelation 6:12–14
Jesus Christ spoke of signs in the sun, moon, and stars. This category follows unusual events in the heavens, including eclipses, celestial activity, and other developments that may be important to watch. Not every unusual event is a fulfillment of biblical prophecy.
Perilous Times
2 Timothy 3:1–5; Matthew 24:12
The Bible warns that the last days will bring perilous times. Paul described people becoming selfish, violent, dishonest, and lacking natural affection. This category follows civil unrest, riots, lawlessness, moral decline, and growing problems in society that reflect these conditions.
Christian Persecution
Matthew 24:9; John 15:18–20
Jesus Christ warned that His followers would face hatred and persecution. This category follows threats, violence, imprisonment, and restrictions against people who profess Christianity.
Not all who call themselves Christians are necessarily God’s Saints. However, persecution of those who act in Christ’s name is real and may also affect God’s faithful people.
Warning
Ezekiel 33:6–7
The Bible describes a watchman who warns people when he sees danger approaching. This category covers serious threats and harmful developments that deserve attention, such as growing national debt or dangers to public safety and freedom.
Warning is used when a danger can be identified but the article does not fit another, more specific category.
Watching
Mark 13:37; Habakkuk 2:1
Jesus Christ instructed His followers to watch. This category follows important events, decisions, and changes taking place in the world whose future effects are not yet clear.
These developments may become more important over time. Watching is used when an article does not fit another, more specific category.
Good News
Proverbs 25:25; Daniel 11:34
The Bible reminds us that good news brings encouragement, even during difficult times. This category shares reports of people receiving help, lives being saved, freedoms being protected, and suffering being reduced.
Acts of kindness, courage, and mercy remind us that hope and relief are still possible in a troubled world.
Judge sides with Biden, rules that Christian college must open women’s bedrooms and showers to biological males?
71-Year-Old Pastor Arrested for Causing ‘Alarm and Distress’ for ‘Homophobic’ Message on Marriage
Christian News – April 30, 2021
(Christian Concern) — John Sherwood, a UK pastor, was arrested in North West London this past Friday, April 23, and detained overnight – all for speaking about what the Bible says about marriage.
John, in his early 70s, is minister of a north London church, and was preaching with a colleague in the centre of Uxbridge on Friday, as he regularly does. After speaking on the final verses in Genesis 1, where it says that God created mankind in his own image, creating them male and female, a number of police officers appeared on the scene. Reportedly, three complaints had been received about the pastor’s teaching, and the police accused him of causing “alarm and distress” to the public.
After speaking to the police, John resumed his preaching, speaking on freedom of speech. However, a couple of bystanders in the crowd apparently shouted that John’s preaching was “homophobic” and “hate speech”. John spoke to the police once more.
What quickly followed was a brutal arrest, where an officer took away the pastor’s Bible and pulled him from the steps where he had been preaching. Three officers gathered around him to handcuff him and take him away.
You can read more about the case from Pastor John Sherwood’s colleague, Peter Simpson, on The Conservative Woman blog.
China Removes Bible Apps from App Store, Shuts Down Popular Christian Websites
Michael Foust – May 4, 2021
China’s government in recent days continued its clampdown on Christianity within cyberspace by banning various Bible apps and shutting down WeChat Christian public accounts, according to a new report.
International Christian Concern reported May 1 that Christian accounts on WeChat – a Chinese social media platform – are no longer available. When Chinese citizens attempt to access WeChat Christian pages such as “Gospel League” and “Life Quarterly,” they receive a message reading, “[We] received [a] report that [this account] violates the ‘Internet User Public Account Information Services Management Provisions’ and its account has been blocked and suspended.”
Father Francis Liu of the Chinese Christian Fellowship of Righteousness posted screenshots of the blocked pages on his Twitter page, according to International Christian Concern.
Meanwhile, the Chinese government has removed Bible apps from the Chinese app store, according to ICC.
“Those who want to download Bible Apps have to use [a] VPN to circumvent the Firewall,” ICC said in its report.
This is not the first time China has targeted Bible apps. In 2019, China’s government removed a 6-year-old Chinese Bible app called WeDevote after it had been downloaded 10 million times, World reported. Popular American Bible apps such as YouVersion are not available in the Chinese app store.
Christian Pastor Arrested in London for Quoting ‘Homophobic’ Bible Verses
Kurt Zindulka – April 29, 2021
Police in London arrested a Christian street preacher for allegedly causing “alarm and distress” to pedestrians for citing allegedly “homophobic” verses from Genesis.
On Friday, Pastor John Sherwood was preaching alongside Pastor Peter Simpson of the Penn Free Methodist Church outside the Uxbridge Underground Station — in Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s own constituency.
Writing in the Conservative Woman on Tuesday, Pastor Simpson said that Sherwood preached on the final verses of Genisis 1, saying: “God’s design in creating mankind was to set human beings in families, headed by a father and a mother, not by two fathers or by two mothers. The distinction within mankind of just two genders, male and female, made in the image of God, constitutes the essence of God’s created order.”
Simpson said that the police informed them that three complaints were made in response to the street sermon.
He said that a police officer warned that he and Sherwood should avoid making any “homophobic statements” and that there is “no freedom to make statements which offend people”.
The police ultimately dragged Sherwood off his step stool and forcibly handcuffed the septuagenarian preacher.
“This dignified man of God, who is in his early 70s, was marched off to a nearby police car, as one of the helpers from my church cried out, ‘What has happened to us as a nation that a man can no longer preach from the Bible?” Pastor Simpson related.
Report: 5.2 Billion People Face ‘Very Severe Violations of Religious Freedom’
Thomas D. Williams, Ph.D. – April 20,2021
Nearly one third of the world’s countries, where two thirds of the world’s population live, violate religious freedom, the pontifical charity Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) reported Tuesday.
Christians are the most persecuted group in the world, according to ACN’s Religious Freedom in the World Report 2021, an 818-page compendium of the state of religious freedom and persecution in the world today.
Persecution on the grounds of religious belief is a growing global phenomenon, the biennial report declares, and religious freedom violations have accelerated and expanded to the point where “systematic and egregious attacks are coming from governments, lynching mobs, as well as international terror groups,” such as Boko Haram or the Islamic State.
The report found the populations of 62 countries out of a total of 196 face “very severe violations of religious freedom,” adding that the number of people living in these countries “is close to 5.2 billion, as the worst offenders include some of the most populous nations in the world (China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nigeria).”
Moreover, during the past two years since the publication of ACN’s last report, “there has been a significant increase in the severity of religiously motivated persecution and oppression which is the principal category of concern,” the report noted.
The Most Tragic Story Never Told: The Muslim Persecution of Christians
Raymond Ibrahim – April 7, 2021
Few phenomena are as horrifically widespread as they are virtually unknown—at least in the West—as the Muslim persecution of Christians.
The general facts are undeniable and have been and continue to be documented in a number of reports issued by a variety of human rights organizations around the world. According to one of the most recent compilations, Open Doors’ “World Wide List, 2021”—which was published in January 2021 and which annually ranks the top 50 nations where Christians are most persecuted for their faith—13 Christians are killed for their faith every day around the world; 12 are illegally arrested or imprisoned; 5 are abducted; and 12 churches or other Christian buildings are attacked.
About 309 million of these Christians “suffer very high or extreme levels” of persecution. “That’s one in 8 worldwide, 1 in 6 in Africa, 2 out of 5 in Asia, and 1 in 12 in Latin America.” More specifically and for the reporting period covered (Oct. 2019 – Sept. 2020), “4,761 Christians were killed for their faith”; an additional 4,277 Christians were unjustly arrested, detained, or imprisoned; 1,710 were abducted for faith-related reasons; and 4,488 Churches or Christian buildings were attacked.
The worst category, “extreme persecution”—the harassing, beating, imprisoning, raping, and/or slaughtering of Christians on sight—occurs in 12 of the 50 nations. Nine of these top 12 worst persecutors are Muslim: Afghanistan (#2), Somalia (#3), Libya (#4), Pakistan (#5), Yemen (#7), Iran (#8), Nigeria (#9), Iraq (#11), and Syria (#12). (That these nations are racially, culturally, politically, and economically very different—Arab, Asian, Iranian, sub-Saharan African, etc.—should be indicative that something else accounts for their commonality towards Christians.)
Over all, the persecution Christians experience in 39 of the 50 nations making the list is also either from “Islamic oppression” or is occurring in Muslim majority nations. This means nearly 80 percent of the Christian persecution around the world—including of those 13 Christians killed for their faith every day—is committed by Muslims.
YouTube Intensifies Attack on Religion, Removes ANOTHER Faith-Based Channel
Kayla Sargent – April 1, 2021
YouTube removed yet another faith-based channel as the platform continues its relentless assault on religious liberty.
YouTube has a long history in deplatforming channels with dissenting opinions, and Christian media organization theDove alleges that it is the latest victim in the platform’s crusade. “On March 22, 2021 the Dove was permanently banned from YouTube,” theDove’s website stated. “Over 15,000 interviews and segments have been posted to YouTube and the Dove has experienced millions of views. In today’s cancel culture YouTube has deleted every video.”
YouTube spokesperson Ivy Choi told Free Speech America that “In accordance with our long standing three-strikes system, we terminated the channel theDove for repeatedly violating our COVID-19 misinformation and presidential election integrity policies.”
It appears as though theDove plans to fight back. “We are dealing with two fairly significant law firms, one in Washington D.C. and one in California, to see if there’s any recourse we may have to retrieve our 15,000 videos,” Perry Atkinson, the organization’s CEO and president, told NewsWatch 12. “We are looking into three other platforms as to whether or not we can re-establish a way to distribute our videos.”
TheDove’s removal was not the first time that YouTube targeted a conservative, or even a faith-based organization. The platform recently removed LifeSiteNews’ channel, and even censored Senate testimony from doctors on COVID-19. YouTube additionally censored a Newsmax interview with former President Donald Trump.
Unfortunately, Google’s massive video-sharing platform does not appear to be slowing down its censorious campaign anytime soon. TheDove was not the first religious organization censored by YouTube, and it likely won’t be the last.
Former Students Sue to Force LGBT Orthodoxy on Christian Colleges
Tyler O’Neil – March 31, 2021</s
When five unelected super-legislators on the Supreme Court unilaterally amended the Constitution to legalize same-sex marriage in 2015, Chief Justice John Roberts warned that the ruling would pose “hard questions” about the freedom of religious colleges to operate according to their convictions. Former Solicitor General Donald Verrilli said, “It will be an issue.” This week, Roberts’ warning has come to pass, and the time in which Verrilli’s “issue” comes to the fore is now.
On Monday, 33 current and former students at federally-funded Christian colleges and universities launched a historic attack on religious freedom by filing a class-action lawsuit against the Department of Education (DoE). The lawsuit, Hunter et al. v. Department of Education, claims that the DoE violated the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution by granting religious exemptions to Christian institutions that allegedly “discriminate” against “sexual and gender minorities.”
“The religious exemption to Title IX impermissibly burdens the fundamental marriage rights of same-sex couples seeking to attend taxpayer funded religious educational institutions that prohibit their marriages,” the lawsuit, filed by the Religious Exemption Accountability Project, alleges. “When sincerely held religious beliefs become enacted as school policies that harm LGBTQ+ students at taxpayer-funded colleges and universities, the necessary consequence is that the U.S. Department of Education has put its imprimatur on an exclusion that demeans and stigmatizes sexual and gender minorities.”
“The federal government cannot claim a legitimate governmental interest in furthering discrimination that harms sexual and gender minority students,” the lawsuit adds.
Calif. bill could ban conservative Christians from serving as police
Press California – March 16, 2021
SACRAMENTO – A Bay Area assemblyman wants to ban from service police officers and police officer candidates who are members of hate groups or have used hate speech in the past, even in “a private discussion forum” online.
Yet the definition of a “hate group” and “hate speech” used by Assemblyman Ash Kalra’s (D – San Jose) new bill, AB 655, is incredibly broad. Not only does it include armed militia groups and white supremacists promoting “domestic terrorism,” it also includes police officers expressing conservative religious or political views on abortion, marriage, and gender or with membership in a political party or church that does.
One legal expert said the bill would “usher in a new era of McCarthyism” where Muslim, Catholic, Evangelicals, and even registered Republicans would be blacklisted from law enforcement jobs.
“Under the guise of addressing police gangs, the bill at the same time launches an inexplicable, unwarranted, and unprecedented attack on peaceable, conscientious officers who happen to hold conservative political and religious views,” wrote Pacific Justice Institute Senior Staff Attorney Matthew McReynolds.
“Indeed, this is one of the most undisguised and appalling attempts we have ever seen, in more than 20 years of monitoring such legislation, on the freedom of association and freedom to choose minority viewpoints.”
According to a bill fact sheet provided by Kalra’s office, AB 655 is needed to root out “extremist infiltration” into our police departments as evidenced by “the apparent cooperation, participation, and support of some law enforcement,” gave to insurrectionists during the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building.
The document goes on to say that California sheriff departments all over the state have been “plagued by texting, email, and social media scandals where officers exchanged racist and homophobic messages.”AB 655 would require police candidates to receive a background check for “official membership in a hate group, participation in hate group activities, or other public expressions of hate.”Public complaints of employed police officers would result in the same investigation, “and if sustained, could lead to termination.”
Bill could ban Christians from becoming police officers
WND Staff – March 18, 2021
A California state lawmaker wants to ban from service police officers and police officer candidates who are members of “hate groups” or have used “hate speech” in the past, even in private discussion forums.
The news curator Press California reported the bill’s broad definition of the term “hate” could apply the ban to “police officers expressing conservative religious or political views on abortion, marriage, and gender or with membership in a political party or a church that does.”
Pacific Justice Institute Senior Staff Attorney Matthew McReynolds said the bill would usher in a “new era of McCarthyism” that would target Muslims, Catholics, evangelicals and even registered Republicans.
“Under the guise of addressing police gangs, the bill at the same time launches an inexplicable, unwarranted, and unprecedented attack on peaceable, conscientious officers who happen to hold conservative political and religious views,” he said.
“Indeed, this is one of the most undisguised and appalling attempts we have ever seen, in more than 20 years of monitoring such legislation, on the freedom of association and freedom to choose minority viewpoints.”
The sponsor of AB 655 is Bay Area Assemblyman Ash Kalra, a Democrat from San Jose.
The plan would require police candidates to receive a background check for “official membership in a hate group, participation in hate group activities, or other public expressions of hate,” noted Press California, which was founded by a former CNN.com and NYT Digital multimedia journalist.
Police officers could be fired as a result of a complaint from the public.