Llywodraeth gael y byddwch yn ysgrifwyddon yw'n gweithio i'r wneud yw'r mhwng o'r ffordd. Mae'r mewn amser yw Ruth Galside. Mae'r mewn ysgrifwyddon yn cyllid ddod yn cynllun ysgrifwyddon yma yn y ysgrifwyddon yn ysgrifwyddon a'r cymdeithas gyda'r gyfnod i'r mewn gymhwyllus ym Ysgrifwyddon. Mae'r rôl efo'r cyllid ysgrifwyddon yn cynnig ei ddod o'u cymdeithio ar y rôl o'r rhan o'r tyfu. I'm particularly interested in complex questions that require the use of a range of different types of evidence, and particularly I'm interested in qualitative evidence synthesis. I'm a co-convener for the Cochran Qualitative and Implementation Methods Group and have been working on different methods of qualitative synthesis for about 10 years now. So, I think my presentations are going to be perhaps slightly different to the ones you've had this morning, so I'm going to give a kind of overview of the methods first and some of the assumptions behind it, the sorts of questions that it answers, and then give some examples. In this case I'm giving one example, but we can talk about other possibilities at the end if that's helpful. So, if I can make the thing move on, there we go. So, what is a realist review, the basic questions first? So, this is a type of systematic review which is often referred to as theory-driven, and its goal is more about explaining and understanding what's going on, rather than judging and summarising the evidence which is out there. So, it takes a slightly different perspective to either reviews of quantitative or qualitative purely evidence. It's sometimes referred to as a logic of inquiry, a mechanism for looking at things rather than a methodology, and it can incorporate both qualitative and quantitative evidence into it. Some of you may have already seen this helpful diagram from the epicenter from James Tominson colleagues which tries to explain different types of synthesis approaches from the more aggregative over here on the right to the more configuring or interpretative, and they think of these, if you look at the row along the bottom, in relation to theory. So, while a meta-analysis and content analysis is looking for the sum of what's going on and looks to test theories, so you're looking to test hypotheses and see whether or not they're true. And although I think there's a lot of words and conversation about reducing bias and how objective these kinds of reviews are, anyone who's done them will tell you that there is interpretation about what goes into the review, how you define the question and so on, that these tend to happen before and after the synthesis, not in it, so they're ways of framing the question or using the results from the synthesis. And then right over on the left-hand side here are the more configuring or interpretative reviews, and they've got metre-ethnography here as an example which I'm going to speak about yet next. And in this case the interpretation happens during the synthesis to build meaning. And then you're generating theories, so you're using empirical data to propose theory. And then realist, which is where I'm speaking today and I think you've already had a presentation about framework synthesis, you're exploring theories. So there's just one way of thinking about the different approaches, their relationship to interpretation and their relationship to theory.  And it's been proposed as a way of thinking about complexity in questions which are subject to systematic review, you can also have realist evaluations, so for complex interventions in primary research as well. And it takes a different kind of perspective to traditional positivist research, and particularly in the recognition that interactions between mechanisms and context are really important. So it's not just does something work, it's how does it work in this context with this mechanism. And it wants to explore, create and sometimes test mid-range theories of impact. And a mid-range theory is somewhere between the nuts and bolts daily stuff and the grand theories of everything. It has to be something which is explanatory and slightly abstracted, but also needs to be quite close to the data. And according to Mark Pearson and colleagues, realist approaches are grounded in the realist philosophy of science which holds that it is possible to discern generative mechanisms but they are thought about within the social systems in which they operate. So we're not looking at these very sort of pure positivist ideals about what works and thinking about social systems often as things which bias the findings rather than thinking about them as potentially very important aspects which may be the reason or the way in which something becomes successful or not successful. So it does have a different sort of epistemological and ontological background. So having said that realist evaluation and realist review is thinking about complex interventions, just some definitions around what complex means and these are taken from the MRC report about what complex interventions are in the context of health. So these are mostly sort of public health type interventions that have been considered in this way for the health background. So this is thinking about the fact that there may be interacting components both in the intervention and control groups there might be a number of different behaviours that need to be changed or impacted on by an intervention and those behaviours might be both those who are receiving an intervention but also those who are delivering an intervention. It may also be that there's lots of different groups who are targeted. So for example in a big obesity programme there might be lots of different types of activities that go on under that activity which might include trying to influence schools behaviour, the behaviour of councils or local planning people, it might be targeting children and adults, people who are obese and people who are not and those types of complexities in an intervention soon add up to very different things. It may also be that there's a lot of different outcomes which you're hoping to influence and that they may be very variable as well and also that there may need to be a degree of flexibility or tailoring in the interventions to ensure that they work. So I'm sure all these aspects are very familiar for people who are thinking about conservation and environmental management where the interventions that you're looking at are almost invariably complex and so realist approaches are potentially very useful. So they all really came about trying to what we call unpack the black box where there may be very long and complex chains of influence so where A doing an intervention leads to not just C, D and E but maybe X, Y and Z further down the line that these are very complicated and that in the past we've been quite bad at articulating exactly what is going on in the black box where the miracle occurs. So we're hoping to unpack the black box, we're thinking about chains of causation which may not be linear, may be very long, may have feedback loops within them and importantly we're thinking about interventions where people are what makes something successful or not successful and those inevitably become complex interventions and also that these may be very highly context dependent. So one way of expressing this is to say that the causal relationship between two events can only be inferred where underlying mechanisms of action and the context in which that mechanism occurs is fully understood. And in realist terms this is the way that that's often thought about that it's the mechanism of action within a specific context that leads to a particular outcome. So the implications of that are that the same outcome might be achieved through a different mechanism of action in a different context that they may not be the same in all circumstances or that the mechanism which is used may have a different expression in different contexts to make it happen. And you sometimes hear these referred to as CMO configurations. The language in realist evaluation review is quite specialist and I think people find it quite off-putting. So the context mechanism outcome configurations are one way that people talk about realist reviews and realist evaluations. So the types of questions that realist review aims to understand and again this is a very common expression or set of words that you hear in relation to realist reviews. It's not what works like it is in an effective review. It's explicitly what is it about this program that works for whom and in what circumstances. So it's focusing more on how and why things work or fail and trying to understand how those things come about. So this is a diagram which tries to capture that. So a program intervention may change the context or the mechanisms which changes the interaction between mechanisms and outcomes and produces a set of outcomes. And the other thing that realist reviews try to do is to think about both intended and unintended consequences. So one of the problems with complex interventions is that they sometimes do things that you were hoping they wouldn't or hadn't even thought they might do. And thanks to Andrew Booth for this slide. In terms of what the processes are, this slide shows it's called a traditional Cochran review but any traditional quantitative systematic review has these steps. And realist reviews also have a fairly structured set of activities that go along with them, but they may be different to what you're used to in a standard systematic review and they tend to be a lot more iterative. That original slide that I showed you with the configuring versus aggregating systematic reviews, it said for a traditional review the interpretation is done before the protocol is written and may be done after the analysis has been done but it doesn't happen through the synthesis whereas for a realist review these are iterative processes so that the interpretation may be happening as you go along. So that means that the early stages are often about trying to define your terms, trying to understand what the correct question is for a particular topic and to articulate candidate theories and theories are just explanations here. Again the searching may be much more iterative and inclusion criteria might change through the process as you realise that things that you didn't know were going to matter do matter and things you thought might be important maybe don't have the kind of information that you want. And you don't necessarily appraise the quality of studies in traditional ways either because it's a very pragmatic way of thinking about quality so studies might be included in the review because they are providing a particularly relevant contribution to the theory development and so it may not be the traditional ways of quality assessing. Similarly extracted data may not be the same from all papers which again would not be normal in a traditional systematic review. So the data is synthesised to achieve a refinement of programme theory and the programme theory is to determine what works for whom and what circumstances. So again it's a very precise definition about what you do and what your outcomes are but may be different to other ways of doing it. The other things I think are probably more similar dissemination and recommendations in the same throughout but it does have a sort of different focus. So these are the key steps terrifying the scope searching for evidence appraising and extracting data synthesising evidence and disseminating but again they may go back and forth you may do some stages several times and refine them through the process. I won't go through this in detail but I can share these slides. Again this is just another way of thinking about what questions are being asked at different stages of the review and you'll see that it has a focus on defining what things are what's the nature and content of the intervention what are policies trying to do for example and the searching is all about trying to develop programme theory so it's all about trying to think about explanations for how things work in particular situations. And I've taken this from a paper by Rycroff Malone and all. So one of the other ways of thinking about what's going on is to realise that interventions and policies are theories and that's a core informing belief if you like of realist review so that if we propose doing something even if it's not very well articulated and there isn't a programme theory or there isn't a logic model or there isn't even maybe a textual explanation about how we think something's going to happen then are always implicit if not explicit theories behind interventions we're assuming that if we do this then something else will happen as a result of it. So I'm just going to very briefly present for the last few minutes on a realist review that I've been working on here with colleagues in the UK which is looking at social prescribing and social prescribing is becoming increasingly popular in the UK, it doesn't have a particularly well-developed evidence base and the idea is that within primary care for some patients the appropriate prescription is not necessarily a drug or health technology that it may actually be something social so for people who have for example ongoing mental health problems or have stress that what they might need is encouragement to join social groups who are doing artistic or physical activity activities or involved in charity work or whatever and this has been taken up with great enthusiasm because the NHS is running out of money and without very many ideas about how these might work and one of the things we said was that actually the first bit of that process is completely not understood nobody said what the service referral needs to look like so it doesn't matter how effective your knitting group or your physical activity group is if you don't actually get transferred from primary care into the thing so we wanted to use realist approaches to try and explore and explain different methods of referral into social prescribing and say why they may or may not work so we were primarily trying to develop theories about how we might best support people into social prescribing so we did a lot of searching but in two main phases so the first one was to identify different processes for social prescribing and to use these to develop program theories and by program theories we developed a series of if then statements as a way of expressing those and then once we developed the if then statements we asked our advisory group to prioritise the list of if then statements and we then did targeted searches to try and find evidence which would support or not support the if then statements that we were developing so we had a broad set and then a very targeted set of searches overall we extracted information from 109 papers of which quite a small proportion were kept conceptually rich and developed a lot of our theory so the others perhaps just offered a little bit of supporting information we then used these to develop program theory which were expressed through these if then statements and we identified that there were three key stages of referral how you get how you enrol people, how you engage somebody in an activity and how you keep them going so we used our advisory group to prioritise which statements we should try and develop further and as an example these are the sorts of if then statements which we've come up with which propose program theory for how these activities are most likely to work so for example the first one if the patient believes the social prescription will do them good then they will be receptive to a referral and we further developed that with a text in green to show what influences whether or not the patient does believe these things some of which may be modifiable within the consultation or beyond so these are our kind of program theories and we use that to develop a kind of overarching diagram which showed at what stage different aspects need to be in place in order to try and ensure that people were transferred from primary care into the community and this is our main output from the realist review so I'll wrap up but just to say that Ramesses is a project which is trying to develop and support both realist and metanarrative reviews there's a project page there's a really active gysg mail discussion list which the address is there called Ramesses and they're incredibly supportive of you if you are doing a realist review and you're struggling and you want to know what should I read about this, what should I do about the other it's a very responsive discussion list they've also published the Ramesses groups and reporting guidelines for realist reviews which again are very helpful for conducting them as well as for reporting them so I really recommend if you're doing a realist review or just like to know more to get yourself on the gysg mail discussion list and that's all for me


And thank you all for coming. I'd like to welcome you to this session. I'm going to talk to you about today, about the changes and adaptation we had to take in this organization to adopt GitOps across the entire engineering organization. A little bit about myself. My name is introduced. I'm Eliran Bivas. I'm a self-proclaimed tech junkie. I enjoy experimenting with any technology out there and trying out new features and frameworks. I work for Upslyer for the past 2 and 1 half years now. I'm a cloud native horizontal leader. I work in for the platform group. A little bit about Upslyer. I'll let the number just sink in for a minute, because as you can see, there are a lot of. Upslyer is the market leader for mobile attribution. We operate globally across 20 offices and employ more than 1,300 employees. And as you can see from the numbers, the market is quite large and highly rewarding. A little bit about Upslyer engineering is an organization. The organization itself grew exponentially and now has more than 400 engineers. We work in a squad-like fashion and operate more than 850 microservices that handle 2.5 million event per second. We also operate more than 250,000 cloud resources that can vary, of course, from EC2 instances up to EKS clusters. We also have dozens of SaaS integrations like Datadog and more. This is Reshef Mann. Reshef is a Upslyer CTO.  You're amazing. But something isn't working as expected. It's become very, very difficult to push a new feature into the market. And we must change our method of operation. And that new method will be GitOps. So what happened a few months earlier to that declaration by Reshef? Well, we sat down as a platform and tried to figure out what are the steps we need to take to actually take our infrastructure to its next level. But where do we actually begin? Do we even have issues in our platform or in our infrastructure? Are we helping our developers to achieve enough productivity in their daily activities? Simply put, we had a lot of unknowns to begin with. We didn't really know the exact scale of our architecture. Now that I got you the number of 250,000, we really didn't know that back then. We didn't even know what our developers are actually doing, what are they trying to achieve. It's not like we wish to provide them how to work faster, what prevent them from making it slower. But how are you actually going to start to explore such a huge infrastructure, such as ArtFlyer? As an organization, as an engineer organization, our mission goal is to support the organization towards its company's success. As platform, our customers are the developers. But we need to understand what are their daily needs so we can actually provide them with value that they can benefit their business. This is the end goal of every engineering organization. But how can we effectively collect feedback from all of this engineering organization? You can't simply go and ask each and everyone, what are you doing today? Am I doing right? Am I doing wrong? This is the scale to compare the platform compared to the entire engineering. So we can't really go and ask everyone. It wouldn't scale. And we only knew when there were problems, so they will reach out to us, look, I got a broken cluster or something like that. We looked at ourselves as a platform. We had issues as well. When we started the process, we were split into seven vertical teams that were handling different domains in our platform. We were working mostly in a survival mode. We were trying to put our head above the water, trying to put one fire after the other. Maybe a Kafka cluster would break down, a Spark job didn't complete it, or maybe a deployment didn't reach a certain state. Because of that, it was very hard for us to actually evolve our system. We couldn't really go to the next Spark version or maybe update our Kafka cluster. We were trying to just survive our infrastructure. And it was very hard to align. We were operating in squads, but all of them were verticals and didn't really had a unified experience for our user. Each and everyone had a different mechanism for operating. So it was very difficult to actually collect feedback because a certain feedback would fit a certain team. And it wasn't really an easy task to collect that feedback. If you look at the diagram by Hendrik that described the mode of operations, we were working in a high autonomy but extremely low alignment. Our entire culture was chaotic. It was very hard for us to align. But we were striving to work in high autonomy, high alignment operation, which allows us to be a more collaborative culture. And we were striving to work together towards the common goal. Our road ahead was unknown as I mentioned earlier, but we had to start collecting the information because we had to understand where we had it. We first wanted to focus on the developer experience and the developer experience that we needed to learn is what are the daily activities that we're trying to actually boost? What are the developers are actually doing and how we can assist them and what prevents them, as I mentioned, from moving faster? We introduced a new model that we called the Champions. The Champions were essentially software developers that selected from the teams themselves. And in bi-weekly meetings with the platform, we were able to get what are the requirements and their needs when operating with the platform. It took us a few months to kick off this entire process, but we learned a lot from it. We went from a model that usually we got information just when something wrong happened and then you can really know what they're trying to achieve. You only knew that you're trying to work with them to solve their problems. It wasn't really an effective way to collect feedback. We went to a model that actually got the Champions as a representative for the team and by that, he could actually explain to us, look, this is what we're trying to achieve. This is the goals that we're trying to have and these are the paint points that I have. And we used the model back to actually test out and validate some of our estimations like, will this tool be effective to you? Will this change work for you? And by that, we learned that the entire daily operation of our users were highly fragmented. They had too many systems to operate. If, for example, to push a single commit, it took you like seven different systems just to push it into production and it's very, very tedious work. You have to push a commit to Git, try built it maybe in Jenkins, try and test it in a different system and deploy it in a different one and the operation goes to a different system. The entire experience was ununified. Everything was fragmented. You had to learn how to operate each and every system. And we looked at the autonomy of our developer and we found out even though that we said that we were operating in squads, we didn't really provide them with any capability to actually succeed. If they had any infrastructure requirement, they had to come to platform. If the infrastructure was broken, they had to come to platform. Anything that they needed infrastructure-wise, we were their bottlenecks. We didn't really help them that much. And when you are giving an estimation for a project, it can't really give valid estimation if you're actually relying on someone else, platform. We looked at the setups and found out that they are mostly fragile. If something bad did happen, we didn't know how to bring the system back up efficiently. It was very, very hard to restore any failed system. If, for example, an RDS cluster was deleted, we didn't know how to bring it up. So we were working on a lot of magic there. And last but not least, we had a lot of issues on transparency and the complete auditability of our system. If something wrong did happen, we didn't know why. And it's very, very, it became a very, very tough job to actually learn what to do. And for the example, the RDS cluster, if it was deleted, who deleted it, when, why? We looked at ourself as platform. And we looked at the next evaluation for ourselves. First one we initiated, we called ourself platform, platform 1.0. And then we were split. Some might say too early to seven vertical teams. This is the platform 2.0. Now here comes our next evolution, the 3.0. So we selected two developers from each of the squads inside the platform and formed what we called a cloud-native topic. And a topic is a mixture between a chapter and a guild in a Spotify model. But you can simply adopt a model and say, look, I'm doing something. We did something different because of our understanding of our requirements. We were striving to push for technical excellency for across the platform. And by providing strong alignment for the entire squads in the platform, we were able to give them each and everyone an increased autonomy to work better, to increase their overall impact, increase their activity as a squad and eventually as platform and boost our growth both in infrastructure and human resource alike. We started by reading this book. We want to understand what is the community definition of a cloud-native infrastructure? What does it take for your scalable infrastructure to be titled cloud-native? And by the time we ended reading this book, we kind of looked like this. We were way off. But way off. Our infrastructure was hardly managed. We didn't employ any infrastructure as code policies. Pipelines, sorry. We didn't employ CI-CD pipelines correctly even. We had too many internal tooling that didn't up to the task. And of course, they didn't complain to any community standard. Shocked, but we still had to shop for a solution. So this is exactly what we did. We went around into the community and shopped for a solution. And this was our supermarket. So the CNCF landscape, as you all know, composes of thousands of technologies and we started shopping around for a solution. And testing out thousands of them takes time, but we did exactly this. We invested a lot of time about four months process and we created proof of concept of many, many technologies that we assumed that can help us. We needed to learn what are the benefits and of course pitfalls of each of these technologies. We created POCs to compare Kubernetes and Nomad. We created POCs to compare Argo and Flux. What is different with Terraform, Pulumi and Crossplane? And for that, it takes a lot of time but you learn so much. We met with hundreds of vendors. If I can actually picture it, this will be the smallest part. We met with thousands, hundreds of them. And my daily calendar looked like five meetings a day with different startups and was amazing because we learned a lot how they can actually boost our solution into its actual cloud native infrastructure. How we can get cloud native solution much better? We actually partnered with several startups to actually help us uncover more of the unknowns that we still didn't know about architecture. Once we completed this entire evaluation process, we set out to have this solution principle for our self as upslire engineering. We said that the solution must be intuitive. It must be familiar to everyone, easy to use. It must have a single sort of truth. We don't want the system to be fragmented anymore. It must be our one-stop shop for all the operational information that can be close to your code. We want to have a self serve by boosting the ownership and autonomy of our developers. We want the system to be declarative, no more new tool to learn. Simply tell us what you need. And of course, we wanted to boost the transparency of our system so auditable so it could be easier for us and for their users to understand what happened. And last but not least, one of the solution to be community-driven, no more inventing the will. We wanted to leverage the existing tooling and frameworks that the community already battle tested. If some of it, of all of it, some familiar, you probably heard it. Because the desired set of a GitOps management system is of course to be declarative, version, pull automatically and continuously reconcile. So we figured that if we'll simply say we're gonna adopt GitOps, we're gonna checkmark three of our items and we're good to go. We're only left to do the rest, that's all. But are you can actually adopt GitOps? How you went from the theory of it into real practice? Are you actually create a system that went from the hello world of it to the large-scale system of upslire? We're trying to work with each and every technology that we selected. We were dogfruiting for almost six months just to understand how to operate each and every technology and framework. We tested out several frameworks, tested several tooling, and of course several flows just to understand what is the pain points when using GitOps. And we landed on this intuitive flow, what we believe will be an intuitive flow. We took to, let's take for example, two developers in upslire. The first developer is doing the code commits for the service and also declaring the service deployment plan. The second developer, she's declaring the infrastructure requirement for that service and of course also declaring the pager duty policies to monitor that service. Both of them are pushing to the same Git repository and the declarative format that we selected was Terraform. Once everything is merged, a GitOps workflow kicks in and with a mix of Kube controllers operated by Flux, we can actually apply those changes and those changes could be either to our Kubernetes cluster, to our cloud resources, and of course our SaaS integration. We've given our user great power now and with that come great responsibility. We didn't want them to lose their autonomy that we just gave them, but we didn't want them to actually hurt themselves or others in the process. So we added an open policy agent to guard our flows and we can employ now policy as code to actually provide upslire policy into the process and of course leverage the community policies to guard our GitOps workflow and make it a lot safer. And if you're looking to get more information about this solution, be sure to check out Ayel-Ederot's presentation later on today at 3.30 p.m. GitOps, everything we sure can. Well, she described and go into a deep dive into the technology that the solution is actually doing. So we now figure that our solution is valid. It's intuitive, it has a single source of truth using Git in this case, self-serve and declarative with Terraform. It is auditable, again, using Git and everything now is not homegrown, but uses community tools. We started to give a lot of lectures internally inside the organization. We tried to educate the developers both in the platform and in the R&D, what is the different and how to use Terraform, for example, how to use Kubernetes, how to read the outputs of policy failure. What is the definition that we as Upslier want for GitOps, not the community definition? We tried a different approach here of actually saying that GitOps, for us, is managing workflow for the application infrastructure alike sitting in Git. And we focus on the developer experience using the tools that you're already familiar with, no new tools are involved in here. We explain them how this solution and how this workflow actually solved the pain points that they described earlier to us. The system is no longer fragmented, everything is in Git. You have increased autonomy because you now can employ several self-serve flows. And the system is much less fragile. We can reconcile much easier now and recreate what failed. And above all, the transparency of our system has improved tremendously. It's now very easy for our user to understand who made a change and what went wrong. But of course, we got a very cold response. And to be honest, it's totally understandable. Our engineer teams and other things on their mind, they were pushing for the success of our business. They preferred the known broken flow instead of working with a new integration now. But we didn't really back down on it. We used the construct that I explained earlier of the champions, for example, that we use the champions to better understand what are the fears and concerns when integrating with GitOps and how we can actually provide them with better confidence to work with GitOps. We took all the information that we got from the champions back to the topic and using that feedback to create a unified messaging and communication back to our developer teams. And we kept on dog-fooding the solution. We continuously improved the integration and flow to better assist and deal with the concern our user provided us. So where are we today? In terms of managed resources in our cloud accounts, we went up from 3% to 25% coverage in infrastructure as code and keeping in mind we are managing 250,000 cloud resources. In our new infrastructure, we are covering 97% now, which is a huge improvement for us. We employ several self-serve flows, either for Kafka, Vault, Druid, Console, Kubernetes, and many more. And this was the part that our user adored because they no longer needed to talk with us. They had to do it on their own. They loved it. Our entire engineering teams, each time we provide enable new self-serve flow, they adopt it immediately. Our overall stability of our system has improved tremendously. We still have a lot to improve, but we're getting there. Our provisioning time has improved as well. Some of the system took like a few days or maybe a week to provision. Now it takes a few minutes, so we are getting there. Our overall contribution as an organization team, as a platform team has improved tremendously to open source because we took the knowledge that we learned from using those tools on a large-scale system such as Upslyer and put it with it back to open source. We didn't keep it inside. We wanted to give back to the community all the information that we learned and we're still doing it. We're still in a continuous effort to support our own Upslyer scale in our Terraform controller implementation that already we contributed to flux. We have an improved ability effort to for our drift detection solution. Keep in mind that in a large scale like this, most of the drift detection solutions out there will simply won't work. So we partner with a startup that actually solved it for us. We're still evaluating several solution to continuously complete our GitOps flow. Just a small recap on what we've been speaking of for the past 20 minutes or so. We're hoping in this mode in about 18 months now, we started with a lot of unknowns. We didn't know what our users are doing and we didn't know what infrastructure is actually. We started by collecting the daily activities and understanding using the champions model to get their feedback. We used the topic to create a unified experience of as a platform. We invested a lot in evaluating and piercing several technologies and we kept on evaluating through ourself with dog fooding, the entire solution. We still are dog fooding. This is one of the I think the key item for us as a platform. Above all, we invested a lot in education and open communication of any change that we as a platform took to boost the operability of our systems. And of course, learn back what we can have, what we can modify. And as a platform, we kept going. We wanted to help our developers and promote the growth across the industry. Thank you very much. And I would like to have a special thing to the platform group for enabling Gadoff's in-app slide. If you have any questions, now is the time. Any questions, anybody? Yeah, Max here. Yeah, so in the beginning you said you were all like working in survival mode and I wonder how did you transition to this new model while in survival mode without hurting your existing infrastructure stability? Okay, so yeah, we were working in survival mode. We invested at least a quarter of not implementing any new feature, not working at all with any of the development groups. I have to say that we got a significant help from the management and organization to actually say, look, they're not gonna do anything other than pushing for stability. Any other questions? All right, come on up. Why did you prefer going with a telephone controller and not cross-plane or alternatives? Okay, it's actually a part of it. It's gonna be in an early session, so I'm briefly gonna answer that. The reason for that is that we learned that the community for telephone, it's much, much louder. Cross-plane might be the future. I'm a personal fan of it, but it doesn't really add up to the scale of upslime. And for the entire reconciled process, cross-plane will simply crash in our environment because of the large scale of our system. Yeah, so when you mentioned that you're looking at the telephone controller performance, how big of a problem is it for you at the moment? Like the performance of that telephone? Have you had to optimize, I guess? This is, again, something, it's gonna be a very good story, so I'm not gonna answer that completely. We have a different approach from the we-volved telephone controller. We shared all the white paper, so we have common knowledge, because we learned a lot, but we have different views, but we crashed our system several times without telephone controller. So our scale is much, much bigger than others. Awesome, anybody else? How easy or hard was it to push this new culture of platform among the organization? When I first joined Upslier, most of the items that I recently said that we are doing it, people told me it can be done. So they selected me to lead this topic. I'm the leader of all the topic. And the success rate for the topic was at the beginning extremely low. No one actually wanted to adopt, but using a lot of convincing and a lot of management support, it became very, very easy to push for the first results, and by giving the first results, it became very easy to push for the next milestones. The first results was actually covering a lot of infrastructure as code in very simple flow. The next one was we got the complete group approval, the engineering approval, the CTO approval, is stood in front of an entire stage.   So it's a great boost for us. Thank you.


I have a very important message this morning. So as Pastor Vlad said, I do a lot of work. I'm kind of a strange guy. You go, well, what do you do? I'm an author. I'm a teacher. You're in the Middle East. You lead tours to Saudi Arabia. You do a lot of different things. You're pro-Israel. You love Muslims. Who exactly are you? So I was January of 20. Where are we now? January 2020. That was just before COVID, right? Gosh, it's the past few years have just flown by. So I was with the tour group, with the ministry that I've been partnering with for the past several years. And we're in Israel. So we brought a Christian tour group to Israel.  They go, okay, this is where Jesus did this, or Paul did this, or this sort of thing. And those are wonderful trips. But we were trying to essentially bring Christians over to show Christians the security situation that Israel lives under, to help them understand what the average Israeli lives with in terms of this ongoing threat to their very existence. And so one of the things we did is we went down to a little farming community. They're called Moshev on the border of Gaza. So this was again three and a half years ago. And they gave us a tour of their beautiful little community. I mean, a very small, tight-knit, very beautiful farming community. And the gentleman that was giving us the tour, explained that their children, many of them have really pretty severe PTSD, post-traumatic stress syndrome, because an event happened a few years prior where a rocket actually hit their kid in the garden when they were in school. So think about this, kids five, six years old just starting to go to school and rockets are hitting their school. So he was trying to help us to understand what daily life is like for them. And on October 7th, just several weeks ago now, I was with another tour group. We were in Saudi Arabia. And so I bring groups to Saudi Arabia, which of course is a very different nation from Israel. But we were, so Saudi Arabia is just south of Israel, sort of to the south and to the east. And so we were only, we were staying very close to the border of Jordan. There's a very short distance between the border of Jordan and then Israel. And so we were 15 miles from the border of Israel. So at night you could look up and see the city lights of the city of Elat, which is sort of the southernmost city of Israel. And all of a sudden the stories started flooding in and I was getting texts and I started looking at social media. And these terrorists always post videos of what they do. They're very proud of what they do. And we were watching videos of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip who infiltrated Israel into some of these communities going into homes, murdering families as they were breaking bread for their, it was a holy day, you know, their Thanksgiving, so to speak. There was a concert down there on the border. It was a peace festival. And what happened, you know, when all was said and done, and I knew it immediately, they immediately announced like 80 people dead. And I have friends in the country that are saying, oh, there's hundreds already. And found out that there were over 20 people killed at that community that we visited just a few years ago. 20 people in a small little community. There was another one right next to it that lost over 100 people.  Families just like ours, beautiful little children, wives, murdered, daughters, kidnapped, raped. And it was incredibly emotional. I was trying not to let the emotion of it overwhelm me as I was trying to talk to this group and focus on what we were doing, just knowing that an absolute demonic nightmare was unfolding just over the border. So the title of the message today, or at least the theme, the subject of the message, is why we as Christians should stand in solidarity with Israel. In the days and weeks since then, I've watched the global reaction to this terrorist invasion of Israel. And we've watched as hundreds of thousands of people have flooded the streets of major cities across Europe and even the United States in support of the men who murdered and slaughtered and raped and killed and kidnapped thousands of people. We've watched global support rally for that. And as Pastor Vlad said, you watch TikTok and you go, these are not just Palestinians in exile in London or New York City who are saying, we support what they did because ultimately they're oppressed by the juggernaut, powerful Israel, the occupiers, the colonialists and all this different sort of thing. It's not just these Palestinians, but it's American children who are getting their postgraduate degrees at university who are studying postcolonialism or whatever. And they're joining them in the streets and they believe that it is the cause of justice of the day. You've got some of the strangest things in the world like these LGBTQ, L-O-M-N-O-P activists. LGBTQ, L-O-M-N-O-P, XYZ. And they're supporting the Palestinian terrorists like gay and lesbian, transgender, whatever, activist in support of the Palestine and their chant, of course, is from the river to the sea. Palestine must be free, which essentially means kill all the Jews. To see them supporting that is pretty much like seeing a chicken protesting in favor of KFC. Like you just go, why are you in favor of KFC? But this is what TikTok is doing to our minds.  Everyone's upset about this. Oh, I should be upset about it. Not to mention the fact that our kids have been indoctrinated by Marxism at most of our universities for the past 30 years, but it's absolute insanity.  And we go, well, we're Christians. We know about the Bible. We know what will happen in the last days, so it shouldn't surprise us. But it's awfully painful when it's actually happening. It's one thing, again, to read about it, but to watch it unfold with our eyes. But it's not just these indoctrinated kids who have postgraduate degrees and queer post-colonial astrology or whatever it is that we're paying the universities to teach our kids. It's also been pastors. It's been Christian leaders. I've been watching the language that a lot of Christians are using on social media. And they likewise are celebrating what happened, supporting the Palestinian cause, as if it is overwhelmingly a cause of justice. Now I want to be very clear, the Palestinian people are suffering. There's no question about that. But it's not primarily... Look, in situations like this, I want to be very clear. It's not purely good guys and bad guys. Reality is always a little bit more murky. But there are times when there is one side that is overwhelmingly far more on the side of right and one other side that is overwhelmingly not. And in the case of the Palestinian people, I just want to say, the reason they are suffering is because their leaders are corrupt. Their leaders are happy to foment ongoing hatred and so forth because they have been indoctrinated.  And that the day of judgment will not come and paradise will not be established on the earth, so to speak, or sort of the Islamic version of utopia will not be established until they kill those evil Jews. And if anybody tries to frame it differently, I'm just going to say, you don't know what you're talking about. Hamas as an organization, as part of their very charter, their constitution. Now they've removed it, I want to say about 10 years ago, they removed this because of pressure from the outside because it looks bad, quite frankly. But as part of their charter, they used to have this very clear statement that is a prophecy. It's a tradition within Islam. And Muslims refer to it as the hadith, which is this prophetic tradition. Their prophetic traditions are called hadiths. They call it the hadith of the gar card tree. And the prophecy says this. It says the day of resurrection will not come unless the Muslims fight against the Jews and kill them until there are only a few Jews left hiding themselves behind a tree or a rock. And then the tree or the rock will cry out and say, oh, faithful Muslim, there is a Jew behind me.  That was part of their constitution. And it said Hamas lives and exists to fulfill this prophecy. So is this the group that we want our children and our churches supporting and getting behind because they believe they're supporting the cause of justice in the earth? Or is that something that is fundamentally, transparently easy to see for anyone? A rock can look at that and say, that's evil. And yet half of the spiritual leadership of the church today is blinded by satanic deception. There's no other way to say it. It is a demonic delusion that's sweeping the earth right now. So I've introduced myself. I'm an author. I'm a teacher. I travel all over the world.  I think it's very important that no matter how long we're in the Lord, no matter how much he's changed us, that we never, ever forget who we were when the Lord found us.  But we can never forget who we were. And we're only who we are now because of the Lord. And the gospel itself, this is a very simple reality. The gospel is, who is it for? Who's the gospel for? Somebody shout out the poor. The gospel is for the poor. And it doesn't just mean that economically poor.  Well, I guess I was a garbage man. After high school I was a garbage man and then I had just started working framing houses. I was a laborer. And so I was poor. To be able to go, no, garbage men make good money. No, I was making 650 an hour. We thought we would make a little extra money collecting cans out of the trash so we could make an extra 50 bucks a day or something. But it's not just for the poor. Financially, it's for the poor in spirit. It's for those who recognize that no matter how great they can put out a public appearance, they are still that pathetic loser living in their divorced mother's basement. It's for those who have a humble and meek attitude who realize that apart from the Lord, we are nothing. None of us are anything. That's who the gospel is for. It's for those who, it's for the meek. It's for the forgotten. It's not for the cool kids in high school. It's for the losers. It's for the sick. It's for those with chronic illness. It's for the rejected, the forgotten, the marginalized, the hated. And for the ugly. You know who you are. Now just kidding. Just joking. So I want to just look at a few verses, a few passages because this theme permeates the scriptures. The theme of the Lord's passion for the poor. I want to start out, I mean, I could just almost open the Bible and throw a dart and I would hit any number of passages that highlight this reality. Psalm 72 says, Let all kings, let all of those who think they are something, according to the eyes of the world, let the great and exalted ones, let them all bow down in homage to him and all nations serve him. Everyone bows down to him. What will he do after he returns and establishes justice in the earth? He will rescue the poor who cry out. The poor are the ones that groan and cry out and say something's wrong. Something is wrong with this world. Something's wrong with this, with me. And they cry out to the Lord and he hears the cries of the poor. The Lord will rescue the afflicted who have no other helper. This is the nature of those who are poor. We don't have anything else. We don't have someone to champion our cause. The Lord says, I'll champion your cause. I'll respond to you. Those are the ones that he's concerned for. He will have pity. He will have compassion on the poor, the helpless. He will save the lives of the poor. He will redeem them from oppression, from violence, for their lives are precious in his sight. The Lord is not someone who shows favoritism.  He doesn't care about your ethnicity. He doesn't care about your family background or your wealth. He shows favoritism to the poor, to the humble, but he resists the proud. It's an issue of our view of ourselves in our own eyes, in our own eyes. The Lord shows compassion for the poor. Jesus himself, in order to validate his ministry, think about this, in order to validate his ministry, to prove that he was the Messiah, how do you know that I am the promised one? He highlighted the fact that his ministry was directed to the poor. In the synagogue, he opens up the scroll, Luke chapter 4, verse 18. And what does he say? He said, the spirit of the Lord God is upon me. What was the primary reason that he highlighted? He says, because he has anointed me, he has empowered me, he has sent me, he has commissioned me to preach the good news, the good news of deliverance, the good news of rescue to the poor. That's the gospel. The gospel is the insanity of this age, the injustice of this age, the unfairness of this age, the pain of this age is going to be reversed. There is a day of justice coming. It's called the day of the Lord. He's coming back.  Those who put themselves at the bottom, those who found themselves at the back of the line, maybe you're born whatever it might be, your circumstances, and you've always felt like you're at the back of the line, you had no control of it, and then many put themselves at the back of the line willingly. But for those who are humble, for those who are servants, in that day they will be exalted, everything gets flipped around, and in that day he'll say to the meek and to the humble and to the faithful, you take charge over ten cities, to the mother that's at home with three screaming kids who never gets acknowledged while their husband travels around the world and gets, everyone claps for them. She's the one that gets exalted, and I'm hoping to be worthy to mow her lawn in her mansion. Whatever it might be, you know. I don't know. Matthew 11 verse 25 through 26, the family of God, this family that we're part of. I love the fact that I can come to Pasco, Washington, and I have family members here. I can go down to some place in a rural village in Mexico. I've got family members there. I can go to Saudi Arabia. I've got family members there. I'm not sure about Bhutan. I'm just kidding. I think there's a few believers in Bhutan. Does anybody know where Bhutan is? People are like, is Bhutan really a country? Yes, Bhutan is real. No matter where we go, we have family members. Not just friends, family. But the family that we're part of is a family of fools. I love this passage. I love this passage. At that time, Jesus said, it's one of the few passages where Jesus, the language describes him like really celebrating, really getting excited. Like I imagine he was just... At that time, Jesus said, I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth. Like he just busts out and prays that you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent. And you've revealed them to infants, to babes. He's like, yes, Father, this was well-pleasing in your sight. It says these things have been revealed to the foolish and the weak things of this world. Why did he choose me? Why did he choose you? To shame that which is wise. At the day of judgment, the cool kids will be embarrassed and humiliated. But the humble and the meek will be lifted up. They'll be comforted. So it's a beautiful family that we're part of, but let's never forget, this is a family of fools. Which explains a lot, by the way. It does explain a lot. So I'm gonna jump in and look at a really critical passage that we should all be familiar with. Now, in every generation throughout history, people have rose up with the goal of exterminating the Jewish people. In almost every generation throughout history, numerous times something rises up. And when you read these books, you read these scholars, they study anti-Semitism. They study Jew hatred. It's a really fascinating field because they say there is no single reason. It's a field of study for which there is no answer if it's a secular study. They go, the Egyptians tried to wipe out the Jews. They had one particular reason. But then the Babylonians tried to wipe out the Jews. They had a completely different reason. And then you had the Assyrians, then you had Haman. I mean, even in the Bible, you have all of these different examples of people being stirred up for some various reason to wipe out the Jewish people. And then after the Bible, we have examples like, of course, the Romans continued to, the pagan Romans continued to persecute the Jewish people. But you know what the next major group that started persecuting the Jews were? It was us. It was Christians. I've written a whole book where I survey the history of primarily European Christian theologians who essentially were wrestling with what the Scripture said and how they should respond to the Jewish people. Let me just say something. There's a lot of stuff in the Bible that says some really harsh stuff toward the Jews. If you were to record every single conversation that I have in my house with my kids, I've said some pretty harsh stuff to my kids. Right? But if some stranger in the grocery store says those things to my kids, there's going to be a fight. Do you see the difference? Many of the things that are in this Bible, they are in family discussions. You have Moses. You have Moses saying harsh things. And that's okay. But if you're not Jewish and you start quoting these things and making social media posts and applying them to all Jews today, you might be profoundly out of line. And that's what we see a lot of because the Bible actually has a lot of ammunition, both in Torah and throughout the prophets. They are rebuking their own people, calling them back to faithfulness. But then you have all these people with these sort of distorted, conspiratorial ideas that are just being fomented on social media and YouTube and TikTok. And they start regurgitating and reciting this stuff. And they think they're following the path of God. There's a tremendous amount of this. One of the little tropes or one of the little ideas that's floating around there, you'll see it a lot. If you pay attention, you'll see people say, the Jews that live in Israel today, they're not real Jews. They're fake Jews. And I won't get into the whole history of this. Essentially, I mean, it's just always some weird thing. But essentially they say at a certain point in history there was this kingdom, this Turkish, ethnically Turkish European kingdom, the Khazars, and many of them converted to Judaism. And so what this sort of thing will claim is that all of the Jews in Israel today, they're not even Jews. They're fake Jews. They're these Caucasian European Jews. Real Jews would be more Semitic, which Jews come in really every color. It's every color on the melanin spectrum, so to speak. You've got different, they can all be ethnically Jewish. But here's the thing, biblically speaking, Judaism or being Jewish, it's not simply a matter of ethnicity. Yes, it started as the children of Israel his 12 sons, but it's also, and this is where it gets a little technical, it's also covenantal, which is to say that God made covenant with Israel. And if you're a Gentile, it doesn't matter if you're Japanese or Canadian or from Bhutan. If you convert to Judaism and join yourself to the God of Israel through the Mosaic Covenant, biblically speaking, you're Jewish.  And so, you see this even in the lineage of Jesus. You see these Gentiles, they're actually part of his family. And they gave them, they became part of that family. So it doesn't matter, like if there's any reality, and by the way, scientific studies, DNA studies have shown that that whole thing about the Khazars and the people in Israel today, it's not even true. It's not even true, but the point is, it doesn't matter what their ethnicity is. If they say they're Jewish and they're in the land of Israel, they're Jewish. I want to look at Joel chapter 3. Because if anyone out there watching this, you don't agree with me, the Word of God makes it absolutely clear. So Joel chapter 3, and we could point to several other passages very similar to this. He says, in those days and at that time, he's talking about the last days. When I restore the fortunes of Judah and Jerusalem, after he has restored the land of Israel, he says, I will gather all the nations and bring them down to the valley of Jehoshaphat. The valley of Jehoshaphat is the valley that runs in between, it's Jerusalem. Okay, it runs in between the Temple Mount and the Mount of Olives. The Lord says, I will gather all of the Gentiles, all of the nations, the surrounding nations, and I will bring them to Jerusalem. To invade the land of Israel, to attack the Jewish people, to try to conquer and defeat and ultimately to fulfill the hadith of the gar card tree. And he says, in there, the Lord says, I will enter into judgment with them. Why? Why will the Lord enter into judgment with the nations? In our future, in the last days, perhaps in our very near future, the Lord says, I will enter into judgment with them there because of my people, my inheritance, Israel. So someone can say all they want, those people in the land of Israel are not true Israelites. We are the true Israelites. We are the true Israel or whatever. You see these things in the church. You see it in various cultic groups. You see it on social media. The Lord says, those people in the land right now that are about to be invaded, those are my people. That's my inheritance. You go, the majority of them don't believe in Jesus. How can they be my people? Because the Lord calls the things which are not yet as though they already are. And Paul said the day is coming after Jesus returns that they will look upon the one that they pierced and that we also pierced with our sins and they will weep and repent and mourn. And Paul the apostle said, at that time, all Israel will be saved. The survivors, the remnant, they will all be saved. And so the Lord looks at them now even though the majority are in unbelief, knowing what the future holds, and he says that's my inheritance. That is my people Israel. He says the nations, now why? Why do they invade the land? The nations have scattered the Israelites into foreign countries. What we just saw on October 7th where they invaded, killed, plundered, raped and then kidnapped, that was a small foreshadow of what the scriptures describe will happen on a massive scale in the days ahead. He says they will scatter my people into foreign countries. They will scatter them up and they divided up my land. They cast lots for my people. They bartered a boy for a prostitute. They sold a girl for wine. Human trafficking, et cetera, et cetera. He's describing exactly what we just saw unfold but on a far bigger scale. And this is what the prophet, this is what the Lord spoke through the prophet Joel in the range of 3,000 years ago. How did Joel know that the geopolitical realities of the world right now would be exactly what he described? Because the Lord was speaking through him. The Lord was speaking through him. Now I want to look at another passage, Matthew 25, the parable of the sheep and goat judgment. This parable or this passage is part of what's called the Olivet discourse. The reason it's called that is because Jesus gave this discourse or this sermon or this lesson on the Mount of Olives. So if you read the whole story, it's in Matthew 24, Jesus is leaving the temple with his disciples and they go, wow, look at the temple's amazing. You know, it's impressive. And he goes, I tell you the truth, not one stone will be left. This whole thing is getting torn down. And they go, whoa, that's pretty freaky. We'll give us some, you know, teach us when will these things happen? What will be the sign of the end of the age? And he goes on and he gives a big sermon about the end times. And in that, actually I'm going to jump back and read a little part of that. He says, Matthew 24, verse 15, so when you see the abomination of desolation, this is referring to the antichrist after he invades the land of Israel, will set up something referred to as the abomination on the temple mount. And it says, when you see that, it was spoken of by the prophet Daniel. It's beautiful the way Jesus is interacting with the previous prophets. He goes, like when you see this that Daniel talked about, standing in the holy place, let the reader understand, let anyone in Judea flee, flee to the mountains, get out. And then he says, a man on the rooftop shouldn't come down to grab his iPad or his phone. No, just go, his coat, go to the pregnant women in nursing, pray that your escape won't happen on set. And here it is, verse 21. For at that time, there will be a great distress, a great tribulation such as the kind that has not taken place in the beginning of the world until now, nor ever will again. The single greatest horrific nightmare tribulation will happen at that time. Unless those days were cut short, no one would even live. And so this is exactly what Joel was speaking of. I will gather all the nations down to Jerusalem. So Jesus speaks of the worst, most unparalleled, horrific nightmare that has ever been, that has ever been, and then skipping forward here, he's still in the same sermon, Matthew 25. He says this, when the Son of Man comes in his glory, that's when Jesus comes back, he splits the sky, shining like the sun with an army of angels with him. When he comes back, he's describing his own return. Then, then he will sit on his glorious throne. What is that? That is the throne of his father, David. It is the royal Jewish Davidic monarchy will be re-established. There's covenants that God made with David. He said, someone will come forth from you and he will sit on your throne forever. But let's just call it what it is. It's the restoration of the Jewish monarchy that will rule over the earth. So you get all these conspiracy theories that go, the Jews rule the world. No, they don't. But someday a Jew will rule the world. He's still Jewish. He's coming back as a Jew in a physical Jewish body in all nations will bow down to him. So it says, when he comes back, then he will sit on his throne of glory. And by the way, he has not come back yet and he's not sitting on his throne of glory yet. So for all of those Christians who say, all biblical prophecy is already fulfilled back in the first century. I mean, it's just like fundamentally unbiblical. Excuse me. That's the first time I've ever done that without it. All nations will be gathered before him. All the nations will be gathered before him and he will separate the sheep from the goats. As the shepherd separates sheep from the goats, he'll put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. Now I'm going to do a little demonstration here to try to help you visualize it. Jesus was on the Mount of Olives. When you're on the Mount of Olives, okay, so let's say you guys are on the Mount of Olives. You guys are the Mount of Olives and I'm over here on the other hill across the valley that is the temple mount. So if you've seen pictures, when you're on the Mount of Olives, you're looking across, you see the wall and then up on the wall is the golden dome and then you see in the wall you see this gate. That's called the Eastern gate, sometimes called the Messiah gate. It's believed that that will be the gate that Jesus will actually enter through when he comes back. It's most often called the Kidron Valley. It's also known as the Valley of Jehoshaphat. The tomb of Jehoshaphat is down in there in the valley. So Jesus is on the Mount of Olives and he says, after all the nations, after the worst thing that has ever happened in human history happens, the Son of Man will come back, the King of the Jews will come back and all the nations will be gathered before him. Joel said all the nations will be gathered up to the Valley of Jehoshaphat and he says, as a judge, as a shepherd, he'll separate the nations and he'll put the sheep on his right. Now where you are, where he was on the Mount of Olives, in his day, the sheep gate was over here on the right. On the left was the Valley of Gehenna. That's essentially what the Bible uses to refer to as hell, the Lake of Fire.  Sheep on the other hand he says, you come inherit the kingdom that has been prepared for you from before the foundations of the world. And then he goes on and Christian theologians have just really wrestled with this passage. What does it mean? He says, why will he send some into hell? Why will he give some the kingdom? Because I was hungry. And you gave me something to eat. He didn't say because they were hungry, he said because I was hungry. Jesus himself personally identifies with Israel. He identifies with the people who are hated, with the people who all the nations hate and want to kill. He identifies with the poor. And you go, Israel is a rich nation with all this military. Yes, they are. After World War II they said, we're not going to let this nonsense happen again after the Holocaust. We're not going to trust these Gentiles anymore. But they're still the most hated. Israel today, they cannot figure out these secular unbelievers. They're like, why does everyone hate us? Why? Where's your brother in law? He's got the dreadlocks. See in the room? Brother, there he is. Okay, so I'm going to make a joke here, but it's true. Israel has more white people with dreadlocks per capita than any other in the world. It is a country of hippies and peacenicks. They want nothing more, but just a place to raise their family and live at peace and not have everyone want to kill them. Like, it's a very interesting nation. They can't figure out in their secular mind, why does everyone want to kill us?  It's because Satan knows biblical prophecy. He knows where it's all going. He fully understands these things. So listen, something is coming, which is so consequential that Jesus actually says that on the day of judgment, I mean, look, we're saved by grace through faith, right? That's how we're saved. But if that faith doesn't produce action, then it's not real. Jesus said something so horrible is coming that the judgment of the nations will actually be determined by how we responded to the coming crisis, the coming controversy of Israel. Israel is a, it's a test for the world. And the battle lines are being drawn. Are we going to stand with Jesus who identifies with his people?  You took me in. I was naked and you clothed me. I don't know where all these naked people are, but everybody has all these poor... I'm going to start a naked ministry. I need a lot of donations. You got the naked, the poor, the hungry, but you fed me, he says. He identifies with his people. This is absolutely critical. I'm going to end right here that we as believers discern what's unfolding in the earth right now that we know the word of God, that we don't fall for the nonsense, the lies, the propaganda of TikTok, of Satan that we stand with the poor, with the hated, with the marginalized. We stand with his people, Israel, his inheritance. Amen. Subscribe to our channel so you can get new videos every single week delivered to you on your YouTube app. If you go to hungrygen.com forward slash sermons, you'll actually be able to download the transcript, the notes, and the quotes of this sermon and the rest of all of our sermons free of charge. Until next time.


Ranger Bill, warrior of the woodland, struggling against extreme odds, travelling dangerous trails, showing rare courage in the face of disaster, in the air, on horseback, or in a screaming squad car. Ranger Bill, his mind alert, already smile, unswerving, loyal to his mission. And all this in exchange for the satisfaction and pride of a job well done. The other day, Henry Stumpy, Grey Wolf, and I were cleaning our rifles. Next to his horse, a Ranger values his Winchester .30 .06 rifle the most, and he keeps it sparkling clean and ready for instant action. His life may hinge on the dependability of his rifle in time of danger. Of course, the old timer doesn't use our standard equipment rifle. He's got old Betsy, his bold action .30 .30 with an extra long barrel.  As we cleaned our rifles, we got to making chin music about the old days. Henry always likes to hear the old timer talk about the narrow escapes he's had. And then I had a surprise for the boys. But it's about time for us to get into the story. And here it comes. The prehistoric monster. Say, I can see my face in the barrel of my rifle. It's so clean.  There ain't no place for it at all. You know what I mean. Here, take a look. Well, there's a clean barrel. Let me see. Yeah, plenty of good luck now. You brag about how clean it got. You said it, very well. Well, old timer, what do you see? I see a speck of dirt. You do not. No! Let me give a good, long, hard look. Yes, sir, there it is. Plenty of nose on your face. Yes, sir. Let me look. Sure, go ahead. You're pulling my leg. I don't see any dirt. You don't, eh? Where? Down in the rifle, then, at the business end of the barrel. Hey, you put that hunk of dirt in there. Are you sure it wasn't there before? I'm positive. Put it in there.  I didn't either. I'm just looking to see if I can get his goat. What a friend you are. That's all right. You can't put dirt in my rifle barrel and get away with it. Hey, here's a good idea for a new song. I'll get my harmonica. Wait, wait. What's a good idea for a new song? You can't put dirt in my rifle barrel and get away with it. Terrible. Hey, I've got a surprise for you, fellas. What's that? Look at that. See? That is that a beautiful rifle. You say it, Henry. That is peach. Gentlemen, this is the Weatherby Mark 5 460 caliber. What? 460 caliber? When are you going to shoot bull elephants? I'd say, wow. Look at the size of the barrel. I don't expect to shoot bull elephants with it, old-timer. But I've always wanted to have an extra high-power rifle just in case. This one would stop a freight train in its tracks. That piece will not only stop a freight train in its tracks, but it'll make it back up a couple of blocks. While the fellas were giving my new rifle a going over, there were other things going on. Over at Canyon City, a small circus was bedding down for the night. This circus has a small but fine collection of wild animals, two lions, two tigers, two leopards, and the storm of bears and other animals. Then they have their feature attraction, a full-grown and very unhappy rhinoceros, the last of the prehistoric monsters. Jeff Cleing owns the circus, and he is inspecting the animal cages before turning in for the night. The rhinos all put to bed, Jeff. That's good. How's his disposition today? Pretty quiet, boss. We're shorty. Over at his trailer, tucking his family in for the night. You fellas keep a sharp eye on that monster. Understand? Sure, boss. Hey, maybe we'd better give him some more sedative. Keep him quiet until we get the new cage. Forget the dope. Seems to make his disposition worse than when he doesn't have it. Afraid it gives him a hangover. It could be it does, all right. Let's take a look at the lashings on the cage once more. Sure. Hey, what's going on now? That's mean tonight, huh? That's pretty nervous to me. Oh, don't worry about that, Jeff. He's just getting a little exercise. OK, shorty. Just make sure he doesn't exercise himself right out of his cage. Boy, is that a neat rifle. Oh, I don't know about that, young fella. What? He must be joking. Nope. The only thing about that piece is it's brand spanking new. Won't do no better than old Betsy here. That's time you're wrong, old timer. And so I can stop any critter that this new one can with old Betsy. Why not agree? Well, look at difference in caliber. Size don't mean much. It's how he uses it that counts. Old Betsy here never misses. She shoots straight and through. I agree with Grey Wolf. Why, this new rifle runs circles around old Betsy. So I can hold a heavier powder load in the cartridge. Sometime, sonny. But it ain't always speed that counts, either. When you got a mad critter like a grizzly bearing down on ya, just itching to tear ya limb from limb. Sometimes, them big powder charges go clean through. They don't bother the critter much at all, neither. You gotta have a heavy enough charge that'll stop them. The first shot, especially if you're alone. Don't be your rough on the old timer, fellas. He's got his favorite rifle and he's such a perfect marksman that he can drop any large animal threatening to attack him. No! There's a fella that's got his thinking cap on. Now, wait a minute, Stumpy. Henry and Grey Wolf are right, too. How many men can shoot like you can? Well, lots of men can. Well, that's a matter of opinion. Anyhow, I'd like you to break in my new rifle for me. Huh! I wouldn't touch that new fangled piece for a lovin' of money. Why not? Get old Betsy here. It can take care of anything it can. Old Betsy's getting tired out, you know, Stumpy. I don't know any such thing. I'm sure I'll later approve it to ya. All right. We'll let it stand that way. Only I hope when the time comes, it doesn't cost somebody a trip to the hospital. What was that noise? I don't know, sir. Hey, hey, what was that crash? Shorty, lefty. Yeah, I don't know. Oh, no, the rhino's gone. Oh, I'm sorry I fell asleep, Jeff, but I was exhausted. Me, too, boss. I tried to stay awake. Never mind that now. Let's get all the men together on the double. Hey, fellas, come on. Hey, hey, hey, hey! Come on, boys! Quiet down, men. Quiet down. Quiet. As you know, by now, the rhino's on the loose. We've got to catch him. Hey, yeah. We ought to get the rangers in a place to help us, boss. Not yet. That would be bad publicity for us. We'll split up into two groups, grab your white rifles and get the horses. Shorty, you take one group and I'll take the other. Lefty, you stick with me. Sure, I'm ready. Get your guns and mouths and divide them into two even groups and make it fast. Come on, fellas, let's go. Do you want me to get some gear in the truck to capture the rhino? It won't be necessary. There'll be no capture. Please, four.  Easy, King!  All right. Take it easy, boss. Look at your hay. There you are, old girl. Man, that wraps it up, young fella. Let's head for home. Wait a minute. I want to ask you something. What's your matter? Why won't you test Bill's new rifle for him? I think you're a hurt.  Am I right? Sort of, but not exactly. Well, you know as well as I do that the barrel of old Betsy doesn't have the strength, all the heavier charges used in late-model rifles. Who says? Well, I do. I know you hand-load all your cartridges. Well, are you, baby, that rifle something fierce? Maybe I do. Much always comes through for me, don't you? Can't you see that's why Bill's asking you to test his new rifle? Why, it's a compliment to your experience in ability with guns. It is. Sure, boy. Sure. Boy, you know what to expect of that new rifle. Come on, hop on it. Well... No! Stumpy Jenkins. Wait, sometimes you're so stubborn. Why, you put a mule to shame. Is that so? Yes, sir. It is. Well, you mark my words and mark them well. Someday old Betsy's gonna have to do a real tough shooting job. And you'll find out that an old gun is just as good a new gun any day. Put that in your cod and munch on it. Little did any of us, including Stumpy, realize how true his words were. Jeff and his man worked hard trying to track the rhino. But by sunrise, they gave up in despair. There wasn't a tracker among them. And common sense overcame their fear of the loose rhino. The two parties met for a comfort. It's no use, Jeff. We can't find that rhino any more than we can find a needle in a haystack. We're wasting our time out here. We better get some experience help, boss. Yeah, you're right. We're no match for these canyons and valleys. We could walk right into the beast and not know it until it was too late. I don't want anyone hurt. What are you going to do? We better call the Rangers. Let's get back to camp. I'll call from the nearest phone and we'll grab a bite-tea while we wait for them. Hello, Ranger Headquarters. Henry Scott speaking. This is Jeff Kling calling. I have a small circus camped outside Kenyon City. Our rhinoceros has escaped. Now, wait a minute, Mr. Kling. You don't expect me to swallow that hook line and sinker, do you? This isn't a joke. I was never more serious in my life. Well, hold the line a minute. Belle! Belle! Yes, pal? There's a man on the phone. He says a rhino escaped from his circus. Let me talk to him. Hello, I'm Bill Jefferson, Ranger in charge. I'm telling you the truth, Mr. Jefferson. My men and I have been trying to track the beast all night, but we just have been wasting our time. Where are you camped? A mile outside of the North Limus of Kenyon City in Highway 18. We'll leave here at once by helicopter and you'd better be on the level. This is not a joke. By the time it's over, I'll probably wish it was. You know, young fella, we've hunted a lot of armaments and critters, but this beats them all. Yes, sir! Can you lie in rhinoceros? Rhinoceros, Stumpy? What's the difference? Long as in a hippo rhinoceros? This isn't a laughing matter, really, fellas. That beast is extremely dangerous and a real killer. He's the last of the prehistoric monsters. You said it. Boy, wait all the gang at school hears about this. Henry, I want you to carry my new rifle and make sure it's ready for action. Yeah, sure. There are circus camp below. Right. Waiting for us, too. I'll be waiting for help, too. If I be in Jeff's clean shoes, maybe I'm more trouble than he cares at all. Well, you fellas, be ready to climb out as soon as we land now. How long do you think it'll take you to catch him? I don't know, Jeff. All depends on the plainness of his trail.  Suppose he kills somebody. We haven't time to worry. I haven't picked two men beside yourself to go with us. Shorty, Lefty.  They'll track the Rhino on the ground. Okay, but can't we start where we left off this morning? Who's doing this? You rush! What old-timers say is that Rhino may be double-back, and we catch that in trail sign. We ready now, Bill. All right. Henry and I'll scout ahead in the copter. We might spot him. Keep your walkie-talkie open. We do, but we're old-timer. He's got a half-mile start already. Bill, is it going to have to step on it to keep up with that human bloodhound? This is good monotonous, Bill. Yeah, I know it, Henry. Back and forth, back and forth. All we do is scare bears and deer. The hardest part, the Rhino, too, is got that natural coloring, you know. I never thought of that. Hey! I don't know, but that old barn looks like it'd be a good place for him to hide. You might have something there. Great wolf. Yes, Bill?  Is the Rhino heading toward it? It's tracks not turned yet. We'll meet you on the rise, up ahead. Good. You'll be plenty careful. The copter might smoke Rhino to charge you. Roger. Boy, I thought I was in condition. But I guess not. How do you fellas keep in such good shape? Oh, come on, let's rest. We've really been moving. You can rest as well now. Hello, Bill. Hello, Gray Wolf. Are your companions complaining about the rigors of fast travel on foot? Maybe have small breakfast this morning. Most of them mindy small. Don't you fellas ever get tired? My tongue's been hanging out for half an hour. Don't drink very much water. You'll feel it if you do.  Say, young fella, what about that? What's the trail sign show, old dimer? Shows that Mr. Prehistorical Monster went to the barn. Wow, what's so funny about that? It's not prehistorical monsters. It's prehistorical. Didn't I say that? You would say it all right, Stumpy. How about that? Maybe I said it right after all. What do you mean, Stumpy? Wouldn't you be kind of prehistorical if you finally got out of the cage and had your freedom? You're right there. But how are we going to find out if he's in the barn? Well, we'll circle around. Half go each way. We'll meet on the other side. What are we going to do that for? See if the beast is still in the barn. There ain't no trail leading away from the building. We know he's still at home. Maybe that is a good idea. Well, I suppose you'd rather go up to the door of the barn and knock and see if Uncle Rhino is at home. I've got goose pimples now. He's in there all right. He sure is, honey. He sure is. No, we've got to smoke him out. When do we close this? Take it easy, fellas. This isn't just a turkey shoot, you know. Not even a grizzly shoot. That big fella is armor-plated. Hey, hey, that's right. That baby's a walk-in battleship. You've got to hit him right or we're all in real trouble. All right. Great, Wolf. Can you hit the pile of straw just inside the barn door with a fire arrow? I think so. Take time to make bow and arrow. Now go ahead. Take all the time you need. I work fast as I can. I'll help you. Good. We go find hardwood sapling to make bow. How's the Rhino going to get out of the barn? There's fire in the door. You just watch him come out. He'll make his own door. He sure will. Without even breathing hard, neither. I still don't get it. The valley behind the barn leads into the canyon of a thousand fingers. Both sides of that canyon align with smaller canyons. Dozens of them. We'll trap him in there so we can destroy him as quickly and as painlessly as possible. And there won't be any danger of the Rhino getting wounded and escaping to rip up the whole county. That's what I want. Bottle the beast up so he can't do any damage. What makes you so sure he'll go into the canyon? I'll ride herd on him with the copter. I guess you have all the answers. I hope so, Shorty. Shoot when you're ready, Grey Wolf. I ready now. Okay. I won't take off until our friend has made a new door her. The copter might spook him out the wrong way. Light torch, Henry. Right. Perfect shot. I shoot once more. Right. Right in there again. There are fires catching on there. Hey, there he goes! Watch out! Bill, he's turned away from the canyon. He turned him. Bill's got him heading for the canyon now at full speed. Whoa! He's turned again! Get him, Bill! The minute I thought he was going to break for open country. I had the rhino boxed in a natural cage where he couldn't do any harm to life of property.  Fortunately, it was an old and unused building. It was no longer useful. It had been deserted for years. Stumpy, Grey Wolf, Henry, and the rest of the men circled around on the high ground to meet me where I, again, landed the chopper, as Stumpy calls it. Now I was faced with the unpleasant task of destroying the rhino. I knew we could never bring the full-grown beast back into captivity again. Are you and I going to sneak into that canyon and finish him off? No, it's too dangerous on foot, Stumpy, or even on horseback. We're not going to leave him in there. You might get out. We'll finish him off, Jeff, as much as I hate to do it. Yeah, I know how you feel. There's nothing else we can do. A baby rhino we could handle, but not a full-grown one. I'm sorry about this, Bill. I really am. I know you are. Stumpy, I'll spot the rhino from the copter. When I found him, I want you to finish him off from the rim of the canyon with my new rifle. One shot. Okay, but I'd rather use old Betsy here. She won't do it, Stumpy. I say she will. One clean shot, too. Bill... Forget it, pal. Okay, Stumpy, you can use old Betsy to do the job. Language. Just one thing, old timer. Yep, I'm listening. One shot.  Well, sure, I understand. Old Betsy here picked off a charging cougar in a mile. Didn't she a while back? Yeah, yeah, she did. What makes you think she can't do the same in a quarter of a mile? Well, Stumpy, that animal's got an armor-plated hind. Charge on him. Okay, have it your way. You better not miss or you'll answer to me. I don't want that beast to suffer one second. Destruction must be quick and complete. You see him, old timer? Stumpy's trying to get into position, Bill. The overhanging ledge seems to bother him. I was afraid of that. I'll try to flush the rhino out a bit to give Stumpy full advantage. Okay. What's the matter? I don't know. I'm going to have to land on the canyon floor. No! No, that rhino will charge. I can't stop now, pal. I've got to land on the momentum of the rotor. Well, I still have a chance. Stumpy, before he charges the copter, yep. It's too late. You'll never stop him now. Is he down for good? Be careful. Pass him. Good shot, old timer. It's not like a man.  I couldn't suspend you. What would I suspend you for anyhow?  Second, it took two shots. By the way, who zeroed in my new rifle? I didn't. You just didn't have anything else to do.  You knew old Betsy kind of slips a bit on the long shots, didn't you? Well, I fairly likes to give an old friend another chance, you know. Bill, I want to thank you and your men for helping us. You saved our jobs. Ah, forget it, Jeff. It's all in a day's work. Say, what happened to that first shot? Did it really miss? Nope. Here's the bullet, old timer. You just buried itself in the rhino's hide. He didn't even know you hit him. A sterical monster's on the loose! And I'm glad too, old timer. One narrow shave like that will last me for a long time. Well, see you next week for more adventure with...