General Flynn on the Divine Destiny of America

You have to know that the Pilgrims came to America with a sense of Divine Destiny. They were informed by an ancient tradition inspired by Almighty God.

General Michael Flynn understands this and puts current challenges before us in America in proper perspective in a recent interview he gave to Pastor Caspar McCloud in his Spiritual Encounters podcast.

General Michael Flynn on the Spiritual Destiny of America
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Published Dec 3 2022
Length 56:10}

Transcript

Pastor McCloud
Welcome to another edition of spiritual encounters. I am your lionhearted host, Pastor Casper, our guest today is General Michael Flynn, who is a highly decorated three star general.

We read in places like Second Timothy 3:12, "Yay, and all that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution."

I think a lot of churches don't want to read that scripture for some reason. They don't want to talk about that.

General Flynn, you know firsthand about suffering from being wronged, suffering from persecution. You were wrongly prosecuted by a nation that you faithfully served. You were acquitted and pardoned by President Trump in 2020. You've been helping to sound the alarm ever since.

Those that are calling the shots behind the scenes as it were, they've tried to hinder you every way they can. All that's done is make you stronger.

Rest assured this battle, everyone, is spiritual, it belongs to Lord Jesus, Yeshua, and he is going to right every wrong. In fact, before we start this interview, Lord, I mean, look at Second Corinthians Four where it says, the god of this world means the devil has blinded the minds of them which believe not in the least the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God should shine onto them. For we preach not of ourselves, but of Christ Jesus, the Lord, and ourselves, your servants of Jesus' sake for God, who commanded the light to shine on the darkness, has shined up in our hearts, to give us light and knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

And then he talks about all this treasure and earthly vessel, the excellency of the power of God, and there were troubles on every side, yet we're not distressed we are perplexed, but we're not in despair - persecuted but not forsaken, cast down, but not destroyed, because God's gonna right every wrong. Amen.

I found this quote, as I was thinking about this interview with you. When the American founding fathers - John Adams said, the destiny of America is to carry the gospel of Jesus Christ, to all men everywhere. So, welcome to spiritual encounters; and I'm so delighted to see you again.

General Michael Flynn 4:08
Caspar, it's such a great honor to have met you at a recent event up in Branson, and I look forward to having another chance to sit down and chat a bit.

It's interesting what John Adams said, because one of the things that I constantly tell people is the destiny of America is based on which path you choose to walk upon now. People have to choose a path.

You can choose the use of words like righteousness and godliness and all those kinds of words, but you have to choose a path where you have to rise above the fear that sort of hits us between the eyes or in the chest sometimes, when you're attacked and when you're persecuted, when you're beaten down, you become fearful.

It's hard to stand back up and to continue to fight. And I think that's really what John Adams was really talking about: not just the destiny of America, but the destiny of humanity.

When they created - and I use that word specifically - when they created these United States of America through the writing of a Bill of Rights and a Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, these express very powerful sentiments.

When you study the history of our founding, at least 75% of all of the original founders actually drew from the Bible, in order to create the Constitution. And I always tell people that the Bill of Rights, like the Ten Commandments, those are promises that we make to each other, and the fulfillment of those promises are the Constitution and the Bible.

So we actually have these God given freedoms, these God given rights, in things like our Bill of Rights and things like the Commandments that are ordained on us.

The fulfillment of those comes from these other larger documents, because those larger documents are actually teaching us, for example the Bill of Rights, you can read the First Amendment, you can read the first Commandment, and you can get the sound bite; but in order to understand the depth of what those things mean, you have to dive into the actual document themselves.

The second stage of that is if you really want to understand what's happening today, you then have to start to dig into where the Constitution derived from? Where the Bible derived from, and what was going on historically, in the 1500s and 1600s. What was going on historically, at the beginning of the world, according to Christianity.

Let me give you a short story. I grew up in a large family, Caspar, and and it's a family of nine brothers and sisters, an Irish Catholic family. And one of the things that we were taught about and it's so funny, because the road that I actually grew up on this road is called Tuckerman. But the side road and the road that I spent most of my time on, because of the way we were living, that road was called Purgatory. And Purgatory has great meaning.

Not that many years ago, on the other side of Purgatory, this is no kid and this is in a on a small island. I grew up surfing. So I grew up in the ocean, near the ocean, and I've surfed for over 50 years now. On the other side of Purgatory, you come down the hill, to get to the beach to get to one of the best beach breaks in the area that we live near. And it's called Second Beach.

When you come over purgatory, when you rise, you come up to the top of Purgatory, and you come back down, the road that you meet is Paradise. That's the road that you meet.

It's a fascinating metaphor to me for those of us that have lived in Purgatory - and I've lived in Purgatory, and I've lived there because of decisions that I made. In hindsight I felt at the time in my heart, that if I lived in purgatory for a period of time, and I was penitential, then I would rise up and over that hill, and I would come down and back into paradise.

Those are beautiful words. Purgatory is a tough, hard word. Paradise is a beautiful word. But when they meet, they actually meet and this is now physical and taking it to where I actually stood many, many times as a kid watching the surf coming in. I stood at where Purgatory and Paradise met. And it's right there at the beginning of a beautiful, very beautiful beach, where you can watch what God does to nature, right where God just brings in these beautiful sunrises and sunsets, these gorgeous waves that we were out there riding; and this very nice place to be, whether it's summertime or wintertime.

And so the meaning of those two places is something that I have lived and now, I feel like I'm well out of Purgatory and back down this road to Paradise. The principal reason, Caspar, is because I just feel like this is my path back to John Adams (to bring to close the circle.)

The path that I choose to walk on right now is really a path that I believe will either support the future of this country or not. The destiny of America is based on whatever it is that people choose to do right now. When people don't choose to do certain things, and they act out of fear...

There's stuff going on out in Arizona today, you know, and we say sometimes that courage is contagious. I'll finish with this thought and throw it back to you Caspar, because I think that it's so important: courage is not contagious. Courage is a decision. Courage is a decision that you have to make; in fact, you had to make a lot of decisions.

In our brief meeting, and then reading some of the stuff that you sent me and reading a little bit about you, you had to make a lot of courageous decisions in order to avoid a different path, that many in the industry that you were in, and you're still in, chose. Some of them are no longer with us because of that path that they chose; others have struggled with their lives, and maybe they're better today.

When you think about some of the people over the last 40 or 50 years of your life, courage is a decision. It's only contagious when there are large groups of people and then it's not really courage as much as it is that you're being influenced. Courage is a decision because whoever makes the decision, to be courageous will be somebody who will do it, and they will now potentially sacrifice or be willing to sacrifice their very life for that decision.

I will finish up with this idea of courage being a decision. On the battlefield, it's not the person who you would suspect is the hero. On the battlefield, it's the most unlikely person that turns out to be the hero of the day because they made a decision out of some sense of, sometimes out of godliness, out of faith, out of love, principally out of love, really, that they made a decision to go and potentially sacrifice their lives and many of the heroes that we have in warfare that did that, whose names will never be written up on big boards. They did it out of love for their fellow man.

I think that's something that we have to recognize because the United States of America was really built out of the love for not only our faith, but our fellow man, to choose some path that was going to be, or was going to require great sacrifice. And I think that's what we're all facing right now.

Pastor Caspar 13:30
It is a narrow path. The Lord tells us in Matthew Seven, that this is a narrow path, very few find. A path of holiness that we're traveling.

As you're speaking, it reminded me of a story. I was imagining the sunsets and sunrises on the beach, you're looking at and wondering if you knew back then as a teenager, you're gonna end up being a general one day leading an army.

It reminded me that during the American Revolution, and of course, you know, the Crown had their tentacles, the nefarious parts of it messing about most nations; we had General George Washington, he rode up on his horse and I'm sure you probably know this story.

There's a group of soldiers, it's a rainy day, they're trying to raise some wooden beam to a high position. There's a corporal in charge, and he's shouting encouragement, trying to get the soldiers get the beam in its position.

After a lack of success, Washington is sitting on his horse, he's asking the corporal, why don't you join in and help? The corporal says, don't you realize I'm a corporal? Very politely General Washington gets off his horse and says, I beg your pardon, Mr. Corporal, and he goes to work helping this soldiers get the beam in place. He's wiping the perspiration from his face and says, If you ever need my help again, call on me, General George Washington, Commander in Chief, and I'll come and help!

The display of courage and true leadership is - how do you balance that, to ensure that we're helping to do what the Lord said, helping to advance the Kingdom of God, you know that Kingdom Come, done on earth as it is in heaven. So we're supposed to be bringing some Heaven to Earth?

I think as long as power dominates our thinking, most people do not know how to take the thoughts captive when you're talking about acts of courage like theater, I mean, the majority of people spend too much time studying epigenetics and writing books about it.

They don't want to humble themselves as you have. The Lord said, we humble ourselves, he would call on him as the Lamb. We know what's going on today with like the World Economic Forum club. First Timothy 6:10, "For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows." And now they're piercing themselves with unlicensed uninsured gene modifying experimental substances.

I think about that and I think about how General Washington's could have just ordered the corporal to get your hands and boots dirty and help them. Come on lads, you can do this, I believe in you. But he didn't do it that way.

And I think, looking at your life, the way it's been defined, because of God, love of country. You told me in a conversation a while back, that the Army defines you by what you do when no one's watching. And I would like to remind everybody now that in God's army, He's only watching everything you do. So forget about the NSA, the CIA, her Majesty's Secret Service, God knows the intent of the heart. So at the end of the day, how do you perceive yourself as a leader now?

General Michael Flynn 17:17
George Washington was a very, very prayerful guy. I mean, you know, he would always pray before a lot of the challenges that he faced, even when he was Colonel Washington, working with General Braddock up in the northern part of New York, and Braddock was actually killed during the battle with the French and Indians. Washington was shot numerous times and survived, which is an amazing story in and of itself.

From Washington's perspective and prayer - we tend to think of prayers: I gotta get down on my knees, I gotta go to church, I gotta pray or pray before a meal, we prayed before this interview. I think that prayer is also action. So it doesn't require you to put your hands together, bless yourself, and then speak, in some Biblical words, biblical phrases, to demonstrate that you're prayerful. Prayer is action.

It's action from the perspective of what you're taught as a faith based person, exemplified by Washington's actions throughout his life.

From my perspective, it's not that I'm trying to emulate George Washington, what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to act the way I was raised, I'm trying to do things the way I was raised, I was raised in a very tough Irish Catholic family, a very loving family. My mother was a lifelong learner, we were all going to be lifelong learners. My father was a Sergeant in the Army in World War Two and Korea. He went to work and we used to go out and deliver papers and then go surfing.

We were what we believed in, what we believed in prayer as action, and that's one of the things that I was taught. This gets back to what you said about what I described in the Army. You're defined by who you are when nobody is watching. Do you walk by an unacceptable standard of behavior and you don't fix it? If you're looking around for credit, waiting for somebody to give you credit for that change or whatever action you took, then you're doing it for the wrong reasons.

You do things and we do things based on what is right. And I think that for me, if I learned anything, it's that there's what they call the harder right, meaning it's very difficult to choose that path, the harder right path, because you're going to be condemned. It's not popular. It's not politically correct. It's all these things that we face today.

My mom used to tell us when we were kids, and when we were teenagers, that the hardest time to be alive is as a child or a teenager. It's one of the most difficult times in one's life because there are so many pressures. She tried to teach us not to fall for the pressures that you're going to have in life. On the other hand, you're gonna have to learn on your own.

People need to understand particularly this idea that prayer is action. Your act of saying thank you, your act of going and doing something. Washington's act of getting off the horse and going and helping to lift the beam was action. Washington's actions in battle where he always put himself up front, also in the foxholes with the men and in the trenches, instead of sitting back at headquarters and waiting for the reports to come through that are never true.

(Please listen to the interview for the rest)