Watchman on the Wall

Guest (Male): Welcome to Watchman on the Wall, a daily outreach of Southwest Radio Ministries and swrc.com. Today, we examine the latest headlines from the end times with Josh Davis.

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Today's headlines from the end times explores how Turkey inches closer to Israel's borders by moving military equipment into Syria. The Ezekiel 38 coalition of nations falls into place with each passing week. Plus, spy glasses are here thanks to Meta's recent patent allowing the tech giant to equip its smart glasses cameras with AI. These AI-equipped glasses raise some serious privacy questions and carry massive implications. And blasphemous clips continue to surface from Senate candidate James Talarico. Josh Davis connects these stories to Bible prophecy on today's Watchman on the Wall.

Greetings, fellow watchmen on the wall and welcome to another Headlines from the End Times. We begin today's episode by showing you how Turkey continues to inch ever nearer to the Israeli border as it sets up military operations in the country of Syria. The ramifications that that could have, plus we know if you're a student of Bible prophecy how that fits in with the Ezekiel 38 and 39 prophecies as places mentioned in that coalition of nations like Meshech and Tubal in the first parts of Ezekiel 38 are in modern-day Turkey.

So we know they are going to have a key role in this coalition including Persia, which is Iran, including other nations that will be part of this. It seems that most of those nations mentioned, with the exclusion of Russia, are part of Muslim-majority countries that are centered around and surrounding Israel and that they will join in coalition and come together to fight against Israel.

We understand that God will defend Israel and deliver her from those enemies. I believe that battle will take place soon after the rapture of the church but before the tribulation officially begins. Daniel 9 tells us that the tribulation will officially begin that seven-year period when the Antichrist confirms this covenant with Israel, and that's talking about a peace treaty that is signed.

You see, when the Antichrist first comes onto the scene, it'll seem like he is pro-Israel and even pro-God and that he is there to bring peace to the world and is the first one to bring real, lasting peace to the Middle East, or at least so it seems at first glance. I believe that'll be after the defeat of extremist Islam through the battle of Gog and Magog.

So friends, what we're seeing with the headlines shows how the pieces are coming together for that famous or, should I say, infamous battle. And so we understand that there's an anti-Semitic dictator running the nation of Turkey at this point. President Erdogan does not hold back his thoughts, his views, as they want to annihilate Israel. They want to, in their view, liberate Jerusalem from the Jewish people.

They want to reestablish the Ottoman Empire, which included ruling over the city of Jerusalem. In a recent fiery speech, President Erdogan recently called for an end to the Jewish state and what he called the "promised land delusion." He said, "With Allah's permission, we will never allow this," adding that Israel's destruction is the duty of humanity according to reports.

In efforts to carry out that objective, Turkey is now working to position itself in Syria, moving incrementally toward the border of the Jewish state. Israel recently watched as a Turkish delegation visited the Abu al-Dahur airbase, which was considered one of the largest bases in Syria before it was abandoned in 2013. It sits 43 miles from the Turkish border, less than 200 miles from the Israeli communities.

Israeli intelligence learned of Turkish plans to station radar and defense systems on that base in addition to the immediate deployment of Turkish troops to that region. A recent statement from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office stated, "Erdogan is an anti-Semitic dictator who has massacred Kurds, harbors Hamas terrorists, occupies half of Cyprus, and jails record numbers of journalists and politicians who oppose him. He now seeks to extend his aggression against Israel into Syria. Israel will not tolerate it."

North of the mountains of Israel today sits the highly destabilized nation of Syria, whose ragtag army frequently chants threats against the Jewish state. Recently we saw that the Syrian Arab Army in Damascus was filmed shouting, "A storm has risen. Rain down destruction in the heat of battle. Coming for you, Jew, I am coming at you like a mountain of fire. Making ammunition for you out of my own body, making rivers out of your blood. Allahu Akbar," they would say. That is the Syrian Arab Army; they were filmed shouting this together.

Syria's capital is also prophetically significant. In Isaiah 17:1, we read of an unknown future event that will render Damascus as uninhabitable, a ruinous heap. It's not stated exactly how that destruction is going to take place, but Syria remains an important nation to watch closely. Could that be part of that Ezekiel 38-39 battle that takes place, and the destruction of Damascus could be part of what God does to retaliate against the enemies that come in coalition against Israel?

It's amazing to open our eyes and to understand how the pieces of these puzzles are coming together, friends. As I often say here on Headlines from the End Times, I'm not sharing these things with you to frighten you but to alert you. There is a big difference. We need to live with our eyes wide open as we march through these deceptive days that we find ourselves in.

There's spiritual deception all around us. There's spiritual warfare all around us, and we see the evidence of that taking place no matter where you look. We've been talking geopolitically, talking about the alignment of nations into God's prophetic plan, but if you look technologically, if you look morally, you see that same alignment and you see the same spiritual battle taking place.

It's a different kind of spiritual warfare when you're talking about technology, when you're talking about how technology could be used in these things. It's more of a subtle step than what we just talked about. That first story was right in your face. It's like, my goodness, you can see the alignment happening before our very eyes just as God has prophesied.

But the technological advancements and changes that happen to our world happen a little bit more under the radar. Now, I know a lot of people got up in arms recently about the Flock cameras. I shared that with you on Headlines from the End Times well over a month ago, probably about two months ago now, alerting you to the system and what it can do. It can capture your voice, not just the images, and they're set up on light poles all across the United States.

People really got up in arms about that and still are, and there's still ongoing legislation and litigation about those Flock cameras. Well, we're talking about these fixed cameras mounted to utility poles across America. What happens when that surveillance isn't attached to any pole but is attached to a person?

What am I talking about? I'm talking about these smart glasses that are coming out and they're making inroads. A lot of people are saying, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, not so fast. We need to stop this train before it gets too far down the track and we can't stop it."

Spy glasses in one sense are going mainstream. And no, I'm not trying to just be saying something that's a little bit quirky or offbeat. No, it's not some weird thing that you can just get at a novelty shop and it's cheap and just a little gag gift kind of thing. No, these are real. These cost hundreds of dollars, in some cases over a thousand dollars.

But Meta, the parent company for Facebook, for Instagram, a multibillion-dollar corporation, a large, large corporation in the tech industry, and you know all about Meta. Their latest smart glasses patent offers a glimpse of a future in which cameras do more than record what their wearer sees according to reports. They could identify who is there, interpret what is happening, and determine which people or moments matter most to the wearer.

The patent describes meaningful privacy and data security controls, but it also raises questions Meta may need to answer if it wants users and the people on the other side of the glasses to trust this new technology. Now, this is according to this report published on August 13th. They filed a patent with the U.S. Patent Office and it's called "Smart Cameras Enabled by Assistant Systems." This is AI-enabled smart cameras that people are wearing on their glasses.

AI assistant cameras that are capable of capturing things like facial recognition, expression analysis, the gaze of someone, recognizing certain objects. And so when you're wearing these glasses and you're walking around, it can decipher what you're looking at and it can record the data as you're looking at it. And if it sees someone across the room, one of your good friends or perhaps a spouse, and it wants to take a picture of that moment, it can do so and you can give the command.

Plus, it can also capture audio. It's not just a visual capturing device; it's an audio capturing device and it's fit into a pair of glasses. These are available right now on the market. People are buying these and people are getting on board with this kind of system, and the recent patent would only take it even further, adding some of the AI recognition capabilities to what they already have.

And so, friends, we're understanding the world is moving this way, but there's so many ramifications that we really need to think about. For one, the camera is deciding what really matters. In the patent, Meta gave a dinner party example and said that consider there's a user wearing these glasses; they're surrounded by several people. This digital assistant built into these glasses could use facial recognition to determine that one person is the user's wife and assign her a greater interestingness, they call it.

And so the camera could center on the wife while other people are excluded from the frame or blurred, and you capture some pictures of your wife while she's enjoying herself, and it's something that you can post to Meta down the road if you want to. And facial expression recognition could determine two people are laughing. Let's focus more on those that are laughing and capture that moment.

And so the camera, in other words, is no longer simply capturing a scene, it's interpreting what is happening here, what's going on in this scene, people's facial recognition. You can think about the implications that are included in this, and we'll get to that. But the article that I'm sharing with you is quick to point out, oh yes, Meta is taking privacy very seriously now. Meta is not ignoring people's privacy.

However, if you do your research, you understand Meta has a long history of overstepping the privacy boundaries. I mean, social media itself is constantly collecting information about people. How long do they stare at a certain image while they're using Facebook or Instagram? What do they like? What do they love?

How do they respond to these kinds of things? Do they respond at all to an ad for this or an ad for that? If you get on these platforms, it seems like anymore it's just nothing but a string of ads and people that you've never heard of. That's the algorithms interpreting what they think that you will like and showing you other things that they think that you will like—other pages, other videos, other clips, other ads that they think that you will be interested in getting on board with.

Well, we understand that when it comes to the privacy concerns, we need to be very concerned with the direction that this is going. Facial recognition and facial expression recognition can be subject to privacy settings. The identity resolution system can also respect restrictions according to this report that would prevent another person's identity from being searchable.

This patent describes controls allowing biometric information to be limited to specific purposes while restricting its use by other applications or sharing it with any third parties. I know it's sort of just a lot of legalese and what they're doing to try to protect people's privacy. I found this interesting because it says there are things that this AI glasses, AI-powered glasses can do, including speech processing, reasoning, and memory. It will operate locally on the device; it won't be available for other people to access that.

But the smart glasses introduce a hard question: whose privacy really matters? Is it the person who's wearing the glasses that'll never be in the shot themselves or the person standing in front of the camera who will be in the shot? And what if it's a random stranger and what if it's somebody just walking down the street?

There's other serious implications because these implications go far beyond just Meta. You know, Meta's not going to be the only company that's interested in bringing these kinds of glasses to the market. That's not the way that any of this works. They're not fooling the public by even suggesting such a thing. Big tech companies are going to jump on board with this and jump into this market. You mark it down; we know that's common sense.

But there's a lot of concerns with these kinds of things. What can happen? There can be some irreversible consequences that could cause people to be surveilled anywhere and everywhere. Anyone wearing these kinds of glasses, could that be accessed by other people? Just think about the implications, friends. What happens if something is lost? What happens if the glasses get stolen? What happens if it's compromised or hacked into in some way, shape, or form?

What if there's a company that comes out with a much cheaper version without some of the safety protocols and people start wearing those and then they get hacked? Just think about the implications and what happens to all of this information that's being collected. What happens when somebody decides not to delete it but to share it?

How long is that information retained? Who could access these things? Who has access to all this information? And what about when somebody tries to do something nefarious with them? What if somebody wears these into a public restroom, for example—not to get crass with you or anything like that—but what happens when someone does that? We know it's going to go down that road.

We're already seeing some schools that are jumping ahead and saying students cannot wear these glasses because there's been incidents already of cyberbullying—that they walk up to someone, capture some embarrassing footage, post it online, and thoroughly embarrass someone and it really causes a lot of harm.

And so there's lots of implications with this technology. And this is Headlines from the End Times and we're speaking about Bible prophecy, and so we need to understand the connections there. And I think that what we're seeing is digital surveillance is going mainstream. You see, people are growing increasingly accustomed to the fact that everything they do and everything they say could potentially be recorded.

You see, privacy is disappearing from the public life; it's quickly evaporating. Now, prophetically speaking, the Antichrist could use these kinds of technological advances to help him in his quest for world control as described in chapters of the Bible like Revelation 13. And again, we're seeing the pieces of the puzzle come together.

You couple this with what we talked about in our first story about the country of Turkey and how it is inching ever nearer to the Israeli borders in a quest to conquer Israel, to conquer Jerusalem, and then we see the pieces that the Antichrist could use to usher in his world domination rule during the biblical end-time scenario.

There's other pieces of the puzzle that we want to get to, but I want to take just a second to remind you that you are listening to Watchman on the Wall, a daily broadcast of Southwest Radio Ministries. And this is a special Headlines from the End Times episode today, and we're so glad that you have joined us. We invite you to connect with our ministry at swrc.com. That's swrc.com. Or you can give us a call, 1-800-652-1144. That's 1-800-652-1144.

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I could joke with you and say we're starting up a new segment here on Headlines from the End Times. It's the weekly James Talarico episode or segment or whatever you want to call it. It seems like I've been mentioning his name here on Headlines from the End Times so frequently lately, but with each passing week, a new quote comes out and each one is more egregious than the previous.

This is a recent statement that was unearthed from a sermon that he—well, I don't really even want to use the word "preached," but you could say something that he presented at a church, making the statement that "God is not a Christian." That's according to James Talarico, the Democrat Senate hopeful running in the state of Texas, says that "God is not a Christian."

That was a recently unearthed clip from a sermon, if you want to call it that, from October of 2023, just less than three years ago at his home church, St. Andrew's Presbyterian. And his self-assigned task was to condemn Christian nationalism in this message, but he went about it by attacking Christianity in general. Especially when giving a critique of someone's messages and someone's sermons, if you want to call it that, you need to take it in context.

You can't just take a little clip out, although that statement seemingly identifies itself: "God is not a Christian." What could you mean by that if you say it in a sermon? Well, let's get a little bit more of the context and maybe try to give him some benefit of the doubt, shall we?

This is what he had to say: "Do we really think God would make all these beautiful people with all their beautiful traditions for no reason at all? There are so many pathways to the sacred." Wow, did you catch that statement? There are so many pathways to the sacred. That's what James Talarico thinks. The Islamic mystic Rumi said, "Every religion has love, but love has no religion."

Talarico went on to say, "God is so much bigger than our human categories. God is not a Presbyterian. God is not a Christian. God is not a noun at all. God is a verb. God is not a being. God is being itself. God is love. And that's why Jesus is against anything that gets in the way of that love between neighbors, including religion."

End quote from James Talarico. Friends, so much more that we could say about this. But friends, we need to live with our eyes wide open in today's world as we keep looking up and understanding that our redemption draweth nigh. May the Lord bless you, and may you keep in mind that God is still on the throne and prayer changes things.

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