A Christianity with little of Christ for generations causes a nation to become like Judah in Malachi. This includes nations in Western Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S. Many people in all these nations have hearts hardened against the true God and His words to us. Malachi shows that God is preparing His faithful people, so that at the right time He will release them mightily as He did Jesus in Judea. This will heal the hardened hearts of many people who have not yet really tasted God's goodness in Jesus. God has made a way in Christ to rescue each of these nations from heading toward certain destruction into becoming Jesus' national disciple. Malachi helps us to see God's work in His people in any of these nations like Judah while the nation keeps corrupting itself. Then God's sudden release of His prepared people with great power and healing changes everything!

A Christianity with little of Christ for generations causes a nation to become like Judah in Malachi. This includes the U.S. Many people here have hearts hardened against the true God and His words to us. Malachi shows that God is preparing His faithful people, so that at the right time He will release them mightily as He did Jesus in Judea. This will heal the hardened hearts of many people who have not yet really tasted God's goodness in Jesus. God has made a way in Christ to rescue the U.S. from heading toward certain destruction into becoming Jesus' national disciple. Malachi helps us to see God's work in His people in the U.S. or other nation that is like Judah while the nation keeps corrupting itself. Then God's sudden release of His prepared people with great power and healing changes everything! (A note: readers not in the U.S. might prefer the book with the same title and a subtitle "Western Europe").

This projected conversation in heaven between Jesus and John the Baptist in 60 AD shows God's calling to Elijah and John. God called them to minister to their nations to bring them to repent and live in God instead of destroying themselves as people and a nation. Today God calls His Church in a land to bring it and its people to repent and live in Jesus instead of destroying themselves.

We can easily see a great need for many nations and churches to repent in order to get healthy and stay healthy. If we have taken this need seriously, then most likely we have already found that real progress seems disappointingly hard or impossible. We can be greatly encouraged by seeing in the Bible that God plans to transform huge groups of people through His believers in Jesus: whole localities, lands, nations, and people groups. We can also see that this repentance begins with a great repentance of His people in these groups. Producing corporate repentance causes special problems that God wants to solve through His children learning to work with Him, with each other, and with His better ways of living in Christ Jesus. The repentance of both His people in a huge group and the whole huge group goes far beyond what we have seen up to now.

In this book we see how Malachi describes the spiritual illness in the U.S. and certain other materially "developed" nations today. The symptoms reveal their obvious cause. Malachi goes further to reveal the often unseen source of the obvious cause. This is like the unseen flu virus or malaria parasite causing an illness, which can be an obvious cause of chills, fever, muscle aches, and more. Malachi establishes all of this for the spiritual illness today, and then shows God's cure for this otherwise incurable spiritual illness. Malachi also shows what God's people need to do to move into and become a part of His cure for these nations.

A century and a half after the Black Death killed over a third of the population of Western Europe, a new plague swept across the continent. The Great Pox - commonly known as the French Disease - brought a different kind of horror: instead of killing its victims rapidly, it endured in their bodies for years, causing acute pain, disfigurement and ultimately an agonising death. The authors analyse the symptoms of the Great Pox and the identity of patients, richly documented in the records of the massive hospital of 'incurables' established in early sixteenth-century Rome. They show how the disease threw accepted medical theory and practice into confusion and provoked public disputations among university teachers. And at the most practical level they reveal the plight of its victims at all levels of society, from ecclesiastical lords to the poor who begged in the streets. Examining a range of contexts from princely courts and republics to university faculties, confraternities and hospitals, the authors argue powerfully for a historical understanding of the Great Pox based on contemporary perceptions rather than on a retrospective diagnosis of what later generations came to know as 'syphilis'.