Watchman on the Wall

Narrator: Welcome to Watchman on the Wall, a daily outreach of Southwest Radio Ministries and swrc.com. Today, Josh Davis will share the latest headlines from the end times.

Josh Davis: Friend, when was the last time you visited swrc.com? If it's been a while, you're missing out on one of the most valuable Bible prophecy and Christian resource websites available today. At swrc.com, you'll find daily Watchman on the Wall broadcasts, Prophecy in the News television programs, timely articles, podcasts, conferences, books, DVDs, and resources all designed to help you understand God's word and the times in which we live.

Whether you're looking for trusted biblical teaching, insights into current events through the lens of scripture, or resources to strengthen your faith, you'll find it all at swrc.com. Visit today, explore all that's available, and see why thousands of believers turn to Southwest Radio Ministries every day. That's swrc.com.

Signs of apostasy appear as woke churches have replaced powerful hymns like "Amazing Grace" with new, unsacred songs that praise LGBTQ and social justice. Plus, a network of surveillance cameras installed on utility poles across the US can watch and listen to each passerby. Over 100,000 such cameras are active across America. Where will this lead? And how does it connect to the biblical end-time scenario? Josh Davis shares the details on today's edition of Headlines from the End Times.

Greetings, fellow watchmen on the wall, and welcome to another Headlines from the End Times. Well, the woke church continues to slide down the slippery slope away from God's authority. Friends, when you untether yourself from scriptural authority, you become the creator of your own new religion. It's not biblical Christianity, and it should not be labeled as Christianity because it is anything but.

The woke churches are denying the central tenets of the Christian faith, the central doctrines that make a Christian really a Christian. We understand that apostasy is happening within certain churches and within certain entire denominations and groups of churches. Well, in mainline churches, that slide continues, as we begin our first story.

The report tells us that if you walked into many mainline churches today after being away for, let's say, 30 or 40 years, the first thing that you would likely notice isn't the sermon. It's the sanctuary. Banners proclaiming Jesus, proclaiming doctrines of the faith, proclaiming the authority of scripture, have been torn down and replaced by rainbow flags. Pride colors decorate the church auditorium, the foyer, and in some congregations, even the clergy will wear a rainbow stole or vestments. There are visible declarations of affirmation before a single word is ever preached.

Now, the architecture may look familiar. The stained glass is still there depicting a little sheep, perhaps, and Jesus holding him. The pews are still in place. The architecture is still there. But the message has certainly changed. The scriptural authority has been denied, and now the message has changed.

The transformation towards this modern-day expression of woke—not even Christianity, and I'm not going to even call it anything related to it—it's a new religion that has emerged. It has happened step-by-step, bringing us to where we are in the present day, to where it's now even influencing the church's worship. What I mean by that is some of the music that the church is singing. The classic hymns of the faith: "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me." That's got to be anathema to some people in woke churches today.

"I don't need to be saved, and to call myself a wretch? That's the exact opposite of who I am. I am not a wretch. I am beautiful the way that I am. I am beautiful in my sin. I am beautiful as a sinner." That's what the modern progressives would often boast. Don't you think, dear friends? We don't want to be changed. As sinful humanity, we want to deny the fact that we are sinners.

When you try to share Christ with someone, one of the hardest things that you come up against is people being willing to admit that they are a sinner, people being willing to admit that they have done something wrong against a holy God. That is just anathema to our modern sensibilities in much of the unbelieving world. They don't want to admit that they have sinned because if they admit that they have sinned, then that means they are submissive to some authority outside of themselves.

There is some law higher than their own truth. You see, so much of our generation today wants to say, "Live your truth. You do you. You sleep with whomever you want to sleep with. You do whatever you want to do that makes you feel happy." Dear friends, that's the pathway to death. That's the pathway to brokenness. That's the pathway away from healing, away from hope.

Churches that are affirming these kinds of sinful behaviors are just affirming how wicked these places are, how wicked their leadership really is. We understand that they started by blessing same-sex marriages, and it didn't stop there. Now clergy can be openly gay and can be openly LGBTQ, whatever you want to throw in there. Then they started changing the church ordinances. Baptism, the Lord's Supper—these sacred acts of worship that authentic followers of the Lord Jesus Christ hold to be very special and very sacred.

Now, they've changed baptism into trans baptism. That's right. They're baptizing people who want to change their gender, and they're saying, "Well, you were a man. We baptize you. Now you're a woman." How crazy. They've changed the communion bread into shades of the rainbow. Rainbow-colored communion bread presented on the Lord's table as a symbol of inclusion and pride. Do you see the irony of that?

What is the Lord's Supper all about? It's about remembering the body and the blood of Jesus that was broken for our sin. For our sin. "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see." These people are celebrating their blindness, not their spiritual sight. They're celebrating their sin, not the savior, and they're using the Lord's table to do these kinds of things.

Friends, it hasn't stopped there. The transformation has reached the music itself. Throughout church history, our hymns have taught great doctrines, and they inspire worshippers. Those beautiful hymns—I don't know about your church, but my church sings a lot of hymns, and I love singing these hymns. They've stood the test of time. The lyrics convey the truth of God's word, and we can proclaim that truth to one another as we're gathered in worship together. It's a beautiful thing.

Sadly, these woke churches are replacing songs like "Amazing Grace" with more social movement-oriented lyrics, bringing in their identity politics into their modern woke hymns. Now, consider some lyrics from a "hymn"—I don't even want to call it a hymn, but this is what they sing in this woke church: "For gay, bi, and straight, a place at the table. Invited to wed, to baptize and preach. A rainbow of race and gender and color. For queer, trans, and ace, God's justice in reach." That's the new hymn that they're singing at the local woke church.

No more "Amazing Grace." Now it's all about wokeness and "we're all welcome here." Yes, we are all welcome at the cross as sinners. But God has come to redeem us from our sin. We do not celebrate sin. We celebrate the Savior and the fact that He has redeemed us from our sin.

Friends, this is Headlines from the End Times brought to you by Southwest Radio Ministries. I want to invite you to connect with us at our ministry website, swrc.com. That's swrc.com. I'll be sharing some more headlines in just a moment showing how a surveillance state is right here, right now, in the good old USA and around the world. These things are startling. I want to bring you some information about cameras that can collect biometric information.

I'll do that in just a second. If you'd like to give us a call, we're here for you. Our phone number toll-free in the US is 1-800-652-1144. That's 1-800-652-1144. Don't forget about the SWRC mobile app. It's free. It's a great way to stay connected with all the wonderful content that we produce here at Southwest Radio Ministries. Talking about this Watchman on the Wall daily 30-minute audio program—you can listen to every single episode in the free SWRC mobile app.

Plus, the weekly episodes of our Prophecy in the News television show are available right there. Susan Butler's new show, "Living on the Front Lines," can also be watched in the SWRC mobile app. Go to your app store, type in four letters—SWRC. You can download the mobile app. Check it every single day for new content that you can watch or listen to, available right there on the free SWRC mobile app. Those shows and all that information is available in a few other places as well, including swrc.com, our digital hub for all things SWRC. Plus, the SWRC YouTube channel and the Prophecy in the News YouTube channel. Check out both of those channels on YouTube and find some great content available there.

Now, friends, don't forget that in September we're coming to Minnesota, just south of the Twin Cities. We would love to see you there. Registration for that conference is totally free, but we need to know that you're coming so that we can be sure that we bring enough resources with us. Would you register today by going to swrc.com? That's swrc.com. Click on events. Click on that particular event. You'll see who's speaking, what they're speaking about, the location where all this is happening, the dates, the times, and the registration information right there on the website.

Give us a call if you'd like to get that information. Our phone number again: 1-800-652-1144. Now, some of you are new listeners, and we are very grateful to get to know you and to welcome you into our ministry family. We would love to send you our free monthly Prophetic Observer newsletter in your mailbox every single month free of charge. Get on our ministry mailing list by giving us a call today and requesting your free welcome packet. Give us a call: 1-800-652-1144.

Coming up in August, we're going to be taking a missions trip together, dear friends. We're rejoining with our friends from TWR to raise money for radios to send to Africa. Africa needs Jesus, and Africa needs you, dear friends. Would you prayerfully consider how you can be a part of this missions trip as we're going to take this together in the month of August? Continue listening to Watchman on the Wall as we share more information about that campaign throughout the month of August. We'll have a couple of special days dedicated to programming about that coming up later in the month of August.

Now let's return to more headlines from the end times. We're picking up with stories about the coming surveillance state. I say "coming," but these things are already here. Friends, did you know that America's streetlights are changing into surveillance towers? Well, for years, Americans were told that the greatest privacy battles would happen online. According to reports, the debate was centering around social media, smartphones, and internet tracking. Very few people imagined that one of the most controversial surveillance technologies would appear quietly on our neighborhood streets.

They would be mounted atop telephone poles at busy intersections and neighborhood entrances. Well, today, these light poles, these telephone poles, these red-light camera poles have become a flashpoint in a much larger debate over technology, artificial intelligence, and the future relationship between citizens and government. According to reports, this growing controversy is surrounding a company called Flock Safety. Again, Flock Safety. They have cameras that they have installed on a lot of these poles.

It illustrates that Americans are becoming increasingly uneasy with the rapid expansion of surveillance technology. According to reports, there is an estimated network of over 100,000 Flock Safety cameras that are active across the United States of America. Yeah, you heard me right. Over 100,000 of these cameras are currently active across the United States. Now, these cameras can process an estimated 20 billion vehicle scans every single month.

But Flock Safety cameras are capable of much more than scanning vehicles and tracking where people travel and tracking license plates and sending tickets in the mailbox when somebody is speeding through a certain zone, a school zone, whatever it may be. These cameras are built to also capture audio. We understand that eyes are watching, and now the ears are listening. That's where this recent story took a crazy turn.

The company, Flock Safety, recently experimented with what it calls "human distress detection." This is capturing audio. So, for instance, if someone is near a pole where one of these cameras is installed and they're screaming, they're yelling, there's some auditory sign of distress, then the camera can capture that and could potentially report that to the authorities—to the police or to whomever it needs to be reported. "Someone is in distress over here at pole 85 at the intersection of this street and that street."

There was a lot of overwhelming public backlash, and the company canceled this experiment. But the interesting thing to note is the technology is here, friends. It is right here. It's in your neighborhood. It's in my neighborhood. These things are here. These things are now. And if you think about the future potentials and what could happen down the road, friends, I want to tell it to you this way: the Antichrist has all the tools at his disposal that he would need to create this kind of surveillance state during the tribulation period.

We understand the pieces of this puzzle are falling into place. The tools that he would need to govern this world, to survey this world, to control this world are here. They are in place. Now, I'm not saying these cameras are the mark of the beast, and I'm very careful about this language because I don't want you to get confused. I don't want you living in fear. But I want you to open your eyes to what's happening. We understand the privacy concerns that a lot of people have.

But we can't stop there with just privacy concerns. We need to think about in terms of the stage that's being set for the biblical end-time scenario and how someone like the Antichrist could take advantage of this kind of system already in place when he comes into power, when he comes onto the scene. And friends, if the tools are here that he would need to govern this world and to control this world, how close could the rapture of the church be? Because I believe the rapture of the church is the next event on God's prophetic calendar. We don't need to know who the Antichrist is. We don't need to see him on the stage.

But we understand that if we're seeing all the tools in place—and we're just looking at one piece of the prophetic puzzle when we're talking about technology—there's several other pieces of this, like the slide into wokeness. The Apostle Paul warned us about that in the New Testament: that in the last days, perilous times will come, for men will be lovers of their own selves. So, if you're looking at the moral decline, if you're looking at the spiritual decline, if you're looking at the technology that's here, if you're looking at Israel—if you're looking at all these different pieces of the prophetic puzzle, you see how it's all coming together.

Now, last week, if you listened to Headlines from the End Times, I told you about this new technology called "Facewatch." Not to be confused with Facebook. It's not associated with Facebook or Meta at all. It's Facewatch. It's a separate technology. It's an AI-powered biometric camera system that alerts police when certain notorious shoplifters enter stores and establishments that are using this technology in the United Kingdom. Over in the UK, across the pond, as they say.

Well, as a reminder of what I shared with you last week about Facewatch, it captures live facial recognition, and it's used by over 125 retailers operating thousands of stores across the UK. They're going to soon begin sending alerts to police, according to a company announcement. This platform, Facewatch, will instantly call police and they say, "when the most serious offenders trigger a live facial recognition match on entering a participating store."

The system can alert police within four seconds. So it takes just four seconds for the camera to scan a face, to run it through the database, to recognize who that person is, and to send it to police to notify them. It took me a lot longer than four seconds to explain how it works, and it does it just like with a snap of a finger. "There's so-and-so. He's a bad guy, and he's in store such-and-such. Let's notify the police." And boom, they're on their way. Even faster than that, dear friends.

Those technologies aren't limited to the UK. I came across a story this week that shows how similar systems are being tested and even being deployed in the United States of America. That's right. Facial recognition systems are scanning shoppers as they enter a growing number of Grocery Outlet stores in the San Francisco Bay Area. Now, I've not been to San Francisco. I don't live there. I know some of our listeners are in San Francisco, and so you know about Grocery Outlet—that's a brand of stores there.

These cameras are set up, and it is used to compare people's faces against a watchlist of people suspected of theft, violence, or other "unlawful conduct." Isn't that nice and vague? Other unlawful conduct. Now you see how this could be used to surveil people, to control people's movements. And when it comes to the biblical end-time scenario during the tribulation, those that don't have the mark of the beast as that system is rolled out—these cameras could be used to understand, "Hey, so-and-so just walked into such-and-such store, go arrest them."

You can easily see how someone who doesn't have the mark of the beast can't do anything. They could be watched by these eyes in the skies and these eyes in the stores for this unlawful conduct, whatever that is deemed to be by whoever controls the software. Now, they have signs posted at these Grocery Outlet stores that they are using biometric face-matching software in and around San Francisco.

This technology is powered by a company called Safer-Guard. That's S-A-F-R, Safer-Guard. It's an AI-powered security solution for retail loss prevention and asset protection market to prevent shoplifting and retail crime before it happens. We all know that retail crime has been on the increase, and California has seen more than its fair share of shoplifting and increases in crime, especially as people would loot and steal whatever they want.

The retailers are trying to fight back to stop this. So they're installing these biometric cameras in some participating stores that capture facial images as customers enter the store, and it creates a encrypted biometric template inside each camera. Those templates are compared with a watchlist, and a potential match is sent to the store for additional verification before the retailer receives an alert.

Retailers provide this system with images and descriptions of people who have created "incidents" and people that they think have committed illegal conduct inside their stores. And so they're added to this watchlist. People that are suspected of violence or high-dollar thefts or other participating retailers in the same geographic area could communicate with one another potentially as we're moving towards the biblical end-times scenario.

And friends, I don't want these things to alarm you. Yes, as Christians, we need to open our eyes to what's happening in the world so that we understand the signs of the times and that we can biblically stand firm in these days. But I want you to remain hopeful. The story of Bible prophecy is not one of defeat for the Church of Jesus Christ. No, for the followers of the Lord, it is a story of victory. We understand that Bible prophecy culminates in Jesus' victory over every single enemy.

And the last enemy that will be defeated is death itself. One day, we will be with the Lord. And until that day, let's be watching. Let's be praying. Let's be ministering every way that we can to others while we still have a window of opportunity, while we still have the ability of free speech here in the US to proclaim God's truth, to get out the message, to open our eyes to the signs of the times and the reality of eternity and the lateness of the hour in which we find ourselves. Continue to watch and pray, dear friends, and please keep in mind that God is still on the throne and prayer changes things.

Narrator: Friend, for more than 90 years, Southwest Radio Ministries has faithfully proclaimed the gospel of Jesus Christ and the truth of God's word without compromise. Through Watchman on the Wall, Prophecy in the News television, books, DVDs, conferences, magazines, podcasts, our mobile app, and the digital outreach, we're equipping believers and reaching hearts with the hope of Christ and the certainty of Bible prophecy.

Every day, someone discovers biblical truth through this ministry. Someone finds hope. Someone grows stronger in their faith. Someone hears the gospel. And it's all made possible by faithful friends like you. We depend entirely on the prayers and generosity of people who believe God's truth must continue to be proclaimed. Today, I need to ask for your help.

Summer is always one of the most challenging seasons for ministry support, but the opportunities before us have never been greater. If Southwest Radio Ministries has strengthened your faith, encouraged your walk with Christ, or helped you better understand the times, would you prayerfully send your best gift today? Your generosity will keep the gospel on the air, biblical teaching available around the world, and the message of Jesus Christ reaching people who desperately need hope. Please, give now at swrc.com or call 1-800-652-1144. That's 1-800-652-1144. Together, we can keep shining the light of God's word until the day our Savior returns. 1-800-652-1144.

Lord willing, we'll be back here Monday, ready to once again bring clarity to the chaos. So head into the weekend with the encouragement that God is still on the throne and prayer changes things. Watchman on the Wall is a production of Southwest Radio Ministries and is supported by faithful friends just like you. Visit swrc.com to learn more. That's swrc.com.