(By Ron Allen) This week marks the anniversary of the beginning of the first world war. There were many blunders and missed opportunities for peace leading up to the outbreak of the war, but most historians blame the Germans for the start of hostilities. The lesson for Christians today is how the home for Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation could have fallen so far as to start the first world war and then loose Adolph Hitler on his bloody march through history. The concern of Christians is that America seems to be on the same path. By the 1880s, Germany had become the richest and most

powerful country on the European continent. However, as the Germans prospered, they became complacent and lost their religious zeal. German theologians began teaching the documentary hypothesis, denying the truth of the Bible and destroying the faith of many. The government stepped into the spiritual void, substituting the state for God and marginalizing the church. Spiritually weak and desensitized to the Scriptures, the Christians made no outcry when Kaiser Wilhelm I brought the altar of Zeus from Pergamum to Berlin. This altar is widely believed to have been the throne of Satan described in Revelation 2:13.  CONTINUE