NOR BUY, NOR SELL

FOOD WAS THE FIRST purchase she missed being able to make. Restaurants were tantalizing in their abundance, yet as inaccessible to her as Saturn's rings. She thanked God that she had no family to feed. For the first time, she blessed her lonely existence.


Fashionable clothing had never been a prime concern, so she didn't miss shopping at fancy stores. When you had been living on a restricted income for as many years as she had, the clothing budget dictated a comme ci, comme ca attitude towards the finer points of fashion. "If it fits and it's warm, wear it," had been her motto forever, it seemed to her now.


She limped along the busy sidewalk on weary feet, dodging hurrying throngs of well-fed businessmen and clothes-conscious secretaries. Nobody paid her any attention—but then, that was nothing new, either. Why should they concern themselves with just another nondescript C.O.?


That was what they called them now: C.O.'s. Conscientious Objectors - just like those young people who fled to Canada during the Vietnam War so many years ago to avoid the draft. But there was a difference. For her, there was nothing to fight—nowhere to run!


It had all started with debit cards. She had one; everybody with a banking convenience card (euphemistic nomenclature for the Devil's own device!) had one. Such a desireable thing, to be able to access your money without the hassle of writing cheques and carrying six pieces of identification! People everywhere had touted this new banking innovation, and yet . . .


And yet, she thought, soon debit cards had not been enough. The cashless society had not been enough. The Devil's henchmen in financial circles decreed that "in the interests of crime prevention"—to keep drug lords from laundering their money so easily, they said—all users of debit cards would be micro-chipped. Just a tiny computer chip, slipped beneath the skin with a needle in a split-second operation in the doctor's office.


The procedure had been used for years by conservationists to monitor the movements of animals. All livestock in the European Common Market countries had microchips implanted under their hides as a matter of course. Nothing to be worried about; indeed, a technological advance hailed by the press as "significant" and "magnificent" . . .


Why hadn't they protested more loudly, she and her friends? They had thought of themselves as The Silent Majority. No need to defend their Christian principles—their beliefs were so commonly accepted—they might as well have been written in stone. There was no problem going to church (although she usually didn't go) or gathering with friends at a restaurant or the theatre; no problem voicing their concerns. Freedom of speech, and all that. Basic human rights. After all, this was Canada, and it was 1998!!


But the microchip implanting had been accompanied by a mandatory vow of allegiance to the self-styled world leader of the People For Peace movement—a man who emerged in media reports as the long-awaited returning Messiah—a man who the press said had recovered from a fatal wound . . . A man who was not a man, they said, but a miraculous being!


She refused to take the vow of allegiance. She just didn't "buy" the concept of swearing to be faithful to a television image—swearing that this mortal (even if 'resurrected')—was her Saviour, granting him the status of God!


Having refused to take the oath, she had been refused the microchip implant. She entered the doctor's office an ordinary citizen, and left an outcast—no longer able to access her bank accounts, no longer permitted to buy or sell—condemned to a lingering death, or a life of street-smart petty thievery . . .


No, she isn't a real person—yet! But the handwriting is on the wall, and God's Word says the day will come (Revelation 13: 17 ). How will YOU react when you have to make the choice: "Worship this man's image, or be condemned to neither buy nor sell.."


Make no mistake about it: Any man who demands that his projected image (or his clone, for that matter) be worshipped is unequivocally Satan's colleague. When our Messiah comes again, He will come in glory in the clouds (Matthew 24:30), like lightning that is seen from east to west across the sky.


And when Christ returns, He will not need microchip implants to identify His sheep!


Will you be among them? Or will you have been microchipped with the Mark of the Beast?