VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (ABP) — Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson said God's wrath is looming over a nation headed for economic ruin in his annual predictions for the coming year, aired Jan. 4 on "The 700 Club."
Robertson, 79, has a tradition of ending each year in a prayer retreat and sharing what he believes God tells him during that retreat later at a chapel service for staff of the Christian Broadcasting Network and Regent University.
Sometimes the messages are quite specific. In 2008, for example, he predicted a major stock market crash and rising fuel prices. For 2010, Robertson said, God gave him a more general warning of judgment for America's acceptance of abortion, gay marriage and secularism.
"What he is telling me, and I believe is right, is that there is a cloud over this nation now," Robertson said in a segment of the chapel service broadcast on the program. "There's a cloud of God's wrath over America."
"This country has enjoyed tremendous blessing," he continued. "We have been blessed like no nation on the face of the Earth, and yet we have forsaken the Lord."
"You can't have your courts turn against me," Robertson said the Lord told him. "You can't have legislation that is anti-God. You can't foster in your midst things that I call an abomination. You can't do that. And if you do, sooner or later judgment's going to come."
Robertson said God will not bless a nation where abortion is commonplace, homosexuality is institutionalized and government-sanctioned prayer and Bible reading are banned in public schools.
"Fifty million babies slaughtered," he said, in reference to abortion. "It exceeds the slaughters of antiquity."
"How can we pray for his blessing when we have that going on and when we have courts that have ruled repeatedly against him?" he asked. "We have the Bible taken from the schools. We have prayer taken from the children, and now we have perversion that God calls an abomination — we have that legitimized and given a constitutional standing by the court."
Robertson said he did receive a clear word about the economy.
"We are engaged in a slow time of financial ruin," he said. "This country will be ultimately bankrupt. It's just a question of how soon. We're beginning that. That's one thing that I can say for certain that is happening. It's a dangerous thing. It's going to hurt America very badly."
He said it is a problem not so much of government policy but human greed.
"Can you imagine if you are getting Social Security that you would say I want my Social Security check to get cut?" he asked. "The problem is so many people right now are depending on the government for their support, and there's nobody who wants to give up anything at all, and if anybody begins to suggest fiscal restraint, the people will rise up against them and vote them out of office. So you've got a situation where you can't arrest this problem — the big financial problem — because the people don't want it. Only a movement of God that brings in a spirit of self-sacrifice and a desire for the common good and some wisdom are we going to be spared this thing."
Robertson said he viewed God's message as a word of warning, and that God does not want to hurt people but only is allowing it to bring revival.
"I would love to say the Lord told me it's gong to be peace and prosperity and it's wonderful and that God's going to bless America, he's going to bless you, he's going to bless your business, you're going to make a lot of money in the stock market and everybody's going to be happy," he said. "I can't say that."
Robertson claims a good record in the percentage of his predictions that come true, but there have been notable misses. He predicted that Russia would invade Israel in 1982, projected a worldwide economic collapse in 1985 and said Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.) would be elected president in 1996.
In 2007 Robertson predicted a terrorist attack, possibly involving a nuclear weapon, but it did not come about. "All I can think is that somehow the people of God prayed, and God in his mercy spared us," Robertson said in January 2008.
Robertson got in hot water in 2001, when he and the late Jerry Falwell blamed 9/11 on liberals, feminists, abortion providers and gays whom they said prompted God to remove a hedge of divine protection from around the United States.
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Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.
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