In nations around the world, many people are deeply frustrated and angry with their leaders. Problems are overtaking us, and the decision-makers seem only to make things worse.

It takes great leaders to face and solve great problems—and it is clearer than ever that no great leader exists today.

Think of the crises plaguing our world. Riots and violence are widespread. Nations are saddled with mountainous debt. Wars rage in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Artificial intelligence, while promising utopia, threatens to wreak massive destruction. People are more lonely, unhappy and depressed than ever. The threat of mankind destroying itself in a nuclear war looms.

Our problems keep growing more dangerous, largely because God has removed the great leaders!

A Law of History

It is a law of history that great men shape events. Time and time again, Western civilization and the English-speaking peoples were on the brink of death, but then a strong, courageous man would appear at the perfect time. More accurately, God used these leaders to save nations and make them great.

In many inspiring examples in our history, you can see the hand of God behind the leadership of a man: George Washington during the Revolutionary War, Horatio Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar, Abraham Lincoln in the Civil War, Theodore Roosevelt building the Panama Canal, or Winston Churchill saving Western civilization in World War ii.

But God prophesied that He would take away these leaders.

In Isaiah 3, the prophet warned that national sins like family breakdown, corruption and injustice would cause a defining feature in America and Britain before the return of Jesus Christ: a leadership crisis. “For, behold, the Lord, the Lord of hosts, doth take away from Jerusalem and from Judah the stay and the staff, the whole stay of bread, and the whole stay of water, The mighty man, and the man of war, the judge, and the prophet, and the prudent, and the ancient, The captain of fifty, and the honourable man, and the counsellor, and the cunning artificer, and the eloquent orator. And I will give children to be their princes, and babes shall rule over them. And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour …” (verses 1-5).

Military men and eloquent orators like Churchill are nowhere to be found. Today’s leaders are making childish decisions and childish speeches.

Compare them with the greats of the past, and you will see that God has cursed our nations!

Where Are the Great Men?

Churchill warned Britain, America and the world throughout the 1930s that Adolf Hitler was preparing for World War ii. He was proven absolutely right. Leading up to this, however, almost everyone—all the elites, media and academia—scorned him. His own Conservative Party was turning against him as he tried to switch it into emergency mode. “You are casting away real and important means of security and survival for vain shadows and for ease,” he warned. The world didn’t wake up to the Nazi menace until it was almost too late! (For more about Churchill’s warning and why it matters today, request my free booklet Winston S. Churchill: The Watchman.)

In 1939, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain moved to adjourn Parliament from August 4 to October 3, a two-month summer recess with Europe on the brink of war. Churchill protested, warning that it would be “disastrous” and “shameful” for the House to sideline itself at such a moment. Within three weeks, events proved him right: Hitler and Stalin signed their nonaggression pact on August 23, and Parliament had to be hastily recalled the next day. On September 1, Germany invaded Poland, and World War ii began. About a decade of warnings from Churchill went unheeded—until Britain was forced into war to defend Poland.

Churchill was scorned until his critics were finally forced to concede that he was right.

In Isaiah 30:9-10, God says “That this is a rebellious people, lying children, children that will not hear the law of the Lord: Which say to the seers, See not; and to the prophets, Prophesy not unto us right things, speak unto us smooth things, prophesy deceits.”

This prophecy is for this end time (verse 8), and people want to hear “smooth things,” even “deceits”! What dangerous delusion! This is no time for smooth things!

The same mindset prevailed in the years leading up to World War ii. That war could have easily been prevented if only the Western world had faced the facts of what Hitler was plotting and working toward. Churchill called it “The Unnecessary War”: People didn’t admit reality until it was too late!

The Problem Is Theological

The end of World War ii was horrendously different from any other war. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been bombed, and we were entering an age when we could literally annihilate all human life! People were horrified and afraid of what was happening—as they should have been.

“Mankind has never been in this position before,” Churchill wrote in 1924. “Without having improved appreciably in virtue or enjoying wiser guidance, it has got into its hands for the first time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own extermination. Death stands at attention, obedient, expectant, ready to serve, ready to shear away the peoples en masse; ready, if called on, to pulverize, without hope of repair, what is left of civilization. He awaits only the word of command.”

Who talks like this today?

Soon after the war ended, Gen. Douglas MacArthur described the very heart of our problem: “Men since the beginning of time have sought peace. … Military alliances, balances of power, leagues of nations, all in turn failed, leaving the only path to be by way of the crucible of war. The utter destructiveness of war now blots out this alternative. We have had our last chance. If we will not devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door. The problem basically is theological and involves a spiritual recrudescence and improvement of human character that will synchronize with our almost matchless advances in science, art, literature and all material and cultural developments of the past 2,000 years. It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh” (emphasis mine).

Do you hear any generals today speak like that? He said the problem was “theological.” “It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh.” What a profound statement! He was referring to our relationship with God. The solution must be theological. Man cannot solve his problems!

That is exactly what the Bible teaches.

“The way of peace they know not,” the Prophet Isaiah wrote, “and there is no judgment in their goings: they have made them crooked paths: whosoever goeth therein shall not know peace. Therefore is judgment far from us, neither doth justice overtake us: we wait for light, but behold obscurity; for brightness, but we walk in darkness. We grope for the wall like the blind, and we grope as if we had no eyes: we stumble at noonday as in the night; we are in desolate places as dead men” (Isaiah 59:8-10).

What an accurate, truthful description of the cursed world we live in! These men warned us, but the world has for the most part scorned these men.

General MacArthur was a strong, strong leader. But God said in Isaiah 3 that He would remove the strong leaders “from Jerusalem and from Judah.” Jerusalem is a prophetic term symbolizing all the modern nations descended from ancient Israel, of which Jerusalem was the capital. (Our book The United States and Britain in Prophecy will prove that to you.)

Why is that happening in this end time? God has not given us those men like He did in the past—because of our sins! Where are the Churchills and the MacArthurs today? Where are the statesmen and generals like those men?

Strong Families

The biggest reason for the loss in effective leadership is something most people are unwilling to look at: It traces back to the breakdown of families.

Isaiah 3:12 prophesies that in our day, “children are their oppressors, and women rule over them”—contrary to God’s design. The upside-down family structure is really the big sin God is concerned about today. Because of this sin, God has taken away the great leaders. If we cannot get government right at home, we cannot get it right in the nation!

Gen. Douglas MacArthur and his father, Arthur MacArthur Jr., were the first father and son to each win the Medal of Honor, America’s highest military honor. Arthur earned his at age 18 as a Union officer in the 1863 Battle of Missionary Ridge, when he seized his regiment’s flag and carried it up the ridge under heavy fire, rallying his men to take the summit. Douglas received his in 1942 for leading the defense of the Philippines against the Japanese invasion, including the stand on the Bataan Peninsula. Only one other father-son duo shares that distinction: Theodore Roosevelt, for the charge up San Juan Hill in 1898, and his son Theodore Roosevelt Jr., who led the first wave ashore at Utah Beach on D-Day. These were strong families that produced strong men.

When Douglas MacArthur was in the Philippines, he spoke about the nobility of the soldier’s mission. “The military code … has come down to us from even before the age of knighthood and chivalry,” he said. “The soldier, above all other men, is required to perform the highest act of religious teaching—sacrifice. In battle and in the face of danger and death, he discloses those divine attributes which his Maker gave when He created man in His own image.”

MacArthur was referring to Genesis 1:26: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness ….” That is deep spiritual insight. God is re-creating Himself in human beings. We can have His very image, or character. God made us to be different from the animals. We are created not after the animal kind but the God kind.

We need the character of God. We do not have that! So many men and politicians lie and lie repeatedly! That is the evil way of Satan the devil (John 8:44).

A general made these profound points. Do you hear any generals speaking like this today—even pointing to the biblical truth that we are actually being made into the image of God?

Our Cursed State

Many people are deeply dissatisfied with the current leaders and the status quo, and most still believe the problems can be solved if we have different leaders in power. What they fail to see is that there are no leaders equal to the task.

In America, public discontent fueled President Donald Trump’s political movement. However, that man’s admirable qualities are being overshadowed by his vanity and his childish ways.

People fail to see the dearth of great leaders as a curse from God!

Childish leaders lack the will to face strong tyrants. Our will is broken, just as God prophesied (Leviticus 26:19). People who have faith in God do not have a weak will.

When will we face the brutal truth—and repent? Without strong leadership, no great nation can survive!

“As for my people, children are their oppressors, and women rule over them. O my people, they which lead thee cause thee to err, and destroy the way of thy paths” (Isaiah 3:12). God said strong leaders, including strong fathers, would be absent, and that children and teenagers would rule the family and dominate the culture. That perfectly describes America and Britain today. Our leaders talk, act and govern like immature children. Women and feminized thinking dominate public discussion. Teenagers are alienated from their parents; they loot, vandalize and burn our cities. Isaiah 3 is being fulfilled before our eyes.

This despicable leadership crisis is leading our nations into unparalleled disaster! This tragic condition portends national collapse.

People see the problems and the terrible leaders, but they lack the stomach to follow a truly strong leader. It takes strong leaders, like Churchill, to clarify the critical issues and stir the people to confront them. This is where the people’s energies should be focused. Because they lack that leadership, they continue on their course until disaster strikes and threatens to destroy the nation.

In Europe, a Different Outcome

We have been proclaiming a warning about this Isaiah 3 leadership crisis for 37 years, continuing the message from the late Herbert W. Armstrong.

You can see this leadership crisis in nations all over the world. But as Mr. Armstrong taught, Bible prophecy shows that the outcome in America and Britain will be very different from the outcome in Europe.

Notice what he wrote in the May 1969 Plain Truth: “The era of World War ii is now past. Churchill, Roosevelt, Eisenhower, De Gaulle are gone. A new era begins. There has been a saying that with the death of Winston Churchill the last of the ‘great men’ was gone. … The world appears bereft of ‘great men.’ But a world-recognized ‘strongman’ in all probability will now very soon appear.”

Evil men can also shape the course of history. Europe is suffering its own crisis in leadership. The entire Continent is consumed with discontent. European leaders have no answers and only make things worse.

Europe, however, has a long history of strongmen rising to power in crises—only to lead the world into deep darkness.

Daniel 8:23 prophesies that this will happen again: “And in the latter time of their kingdom, when the transgressors are come to the full, a king of fierce countenance, and understanding dark sentences, shall stand up.”

America and Britain fall apart because of their Isaiah 3 crisis, while Europe turns to an able but evil strongman. All are cursed, and all suffer, but in different ways.

Why does the leadership void lead to different outcomes in different nations? The book of Daniel explains that too.

God Rules

God gave Daniel an overview of the great empires that would rise and fall from his time to the return of Jesus Christ. Empires do not rise without strong leaders. God specified in advance when and where many of history’s strongmen would rise up.

God taught Babylon’s King Nebuchadnezzar this towering lesson: “This matter is by the decree of the watchers, and the demand by the word of the holy ones: to the intent that the living may know that the most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever he will, and setteth up over it the basest of men” (Daniel 4:17).

We shouldn’t be too impressed by leaders of this world. God rules them and sets up whomever He will in order to fulfill His master plan. Sometimes even the basest of men rule because God put them there or allowed them to be there in order to fulfill His purpose. He allows all kinds of things to happen, but everything occurs in the context of His master plan.

The single vision of Daniel 2 that God gave Nebuchadnezzar outlines the history of the world’s greatest empires using the symbol of an “image,” or a great statue like those that empires and emperors often set up. This image teaches the greatest lesson mankind could possibly learn: God rules in the kingdom of men!

God cut off mankind from Himself at the Garden of Eden and sentenced us to 6,000 years of developing our own nations and governments our own ways. But He still shapes events by His master plan.

Israel has no strong leaders because of its own sin. But God is also ensuring there are no great men. Meanwhile, God is raising up Europe to correct and punish Israel, so He will set up over Europe a strongman.

We are entering the age of the strongmen—but these will not be great men. Instead they will bring utter destruction!

Christ says that if He didn’t intervene to stop what is happening, no flesh would be saved alive (Matthew 24:21-22). Every last human would die in a nuclear holocaust!

This worldwide leadership crisis has one lesson and one solution. Mankind is incapable of ruling himself, internationally, nationally and individually! The only form of government that will work is the government of God, administered by God beings (Revelation 20:6). This current leadership crisis is leading directly to world cataclysm and the return of Jesus Christ!

Why is Christ returning? To rule all nations: to literally take over the governance of all people in all nations (Daniel 2:34-45; Revelation 11:15, 12:5, 15:4, 19:15).

Don’t trust in a movement, a party or a man. Put your trust in God, and you will never fall!