“For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” - First Corinthians 1:18
The Republican-controlled Senate passed a ridiculously unpopular tax code change in the middle of the night last week, after their ridiculously unpopular attacks on the health care system in the middle of previous nights had failed.
You might look at those decisions and wonder why they would figuratively slit their own throats, reducing their own re-election possibilities so drastically by pushing such draconian and voter-provoking measures. I look at the rest of what the Grand Ol’ Party is doing in the fields of voter suppression, media suppression, and literal doublespeak, and realize that they may very well control the outcome of the next election before it ever occurs, regardless of what laws they pass.
It’s been suggested by many that the path this administration is waltzing down so confidently is similar to what Hitler and Nazi Germany did in the 1930s to secure and consolidate power: control all communication, create us-against-them mentalities, and so forth. At most, I think it’s a weak reflection of the Third Reich’s methods - call it Nazi Lite, if you wish.
But what they’re doing does have a purpose, one ordained by God when He arranged for Mr. Trump’s election in 2016. Never doubt that God is still in complete control. Of course He chose this president, as He chose every other leader in history. I wrote about the Lord’s choice of Mr. Trump here several months ago.
I’ve also written before about the Biblical End Times, and the fact that we are now within twelve months of their launch point: the rapture of Christ’s Believers, in my opinion. (My estimation could be significantly off; I know better than to predict a solid date because “no man may know the day or hour” - Matthew 25.)
And I’ve discussed the fact, a profoundly disturbing fact to the egotistical nation that we are, that the United States has NO explicit role in the End Times. We are not mentioned in any manner, not even as “great power from over the sea” or anything like that. We are not a player in the End Game.
But I’m starting to see a possible niche for our nation in the script that Christ’s written in Revelation, a role in the play eschatologists have been studying for centuries and that’s about to play out in real life. Unfortunately, it’s not a particularly joyful one, nor is it a feature part.
Hear me out.
♰
As we come closer and closer to the Rapture, Scripture says that the Holy Spirit will gradually withdraw from the people of the earth - this is Second Thessalonians 2:6-8…
“And you know what is restraining him now so that he may be revealed in his time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work. Only He who now restrains it will do so until He is out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed…”
That capital “He” is the Holy Spirit, or God within us. The Spirit is what has held back much of the evil which the devil has wanted to push upon the people of God’s planet. (Oh, did you think that this was as bad as Earth could get? If you fail to catch the first train out with the rest of Christ’s Believers, you’ll find out just how bad it can get!)
We see the GOP’s government as a remarkably stark example of this - not only the policies themselves, which are heinous enough, but the outright lies and contradictory statements they’ve used to delude. The fact that they are using the evangelical right as a shield is right out of Scripture’s playbook:
“And then many will fall away and betray one another and hate one another. And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. And because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold…” - Matthew 24:10-12
When our leaders betray us and encourage hatred of those who are different, and people see the ‘false prophets’, those hiding under the umbrella of the church but preach hatred and neglect of the needy, blatantly contradicting the Beatitudes and Christ’s teachings… you can see why “many will fall away”. “The church is a lie”, they will say. “They’re as rotten as the rest.” And “the love of many will grow cold” when they come to believe that there isn’t a God to rely on for goodness.
(But there IS a loving, reliable God. Never forget that.)
As I’ve documented elsewhere, I believe that the evidence suggests that the Rapture of the true followers of Christ may very happen within the next twelve months. I’ve seen no reason to renege on that forecast, and every reason to confirm it. (Did you see that Saudi Arabia just granted citizenship to an artificial intelligence? Whenever God calls time on the world, it’s going to be before the merging of humanity and its creations, the so-called “singularity” that we’re heading for in the next 20-30 years.)
Once that happens, says the Bible, a new-ish world leader will immediately emerge who will unite the world against the ills that seem to have befallen it. Like our administration and any authoritarian government does, this leader may choose to invent foes to unite against. Notice that the US, because of the actions, the policies, and (let’s be frank) the lack of policies of its administration, has suddenly cast itself as the “lone outcast”, a pariah to be shunned by the rest of the world - but because of the sheer economic and military power we possess, we cannot safely be ignored.
So, we will become what the rest of the world will unite against.
Mr. Trump even pulled an obvious Biblical trigger on Wednesday when he announced that the US would become the only nation in the world to recognize Jerusalem as the rightful capital of Israel. Ironically, while that puts us on the right side of Scripture for once, it’s such a huge political mistake that it almost can’t help but trigger the devil’s tripwires.
The Bible, of course, told us this would happen when the End came:
“Behold, I am about to make Jerusalem a cup of staggering to all the surrounding peoples….On that day I will make Jerusalem a heavy stone for all the peoples. All who lift it will surely hurt themselves. And all the nations of the earth will gather against it.” - Zechariah 12:2-3
How fitting if the rhetoric of every nation rallying against this decision, either in Muslim outrage or in political fear of Muslim outrage, is what unites the globe against us! Then, in the moment that millions (NOT billions - the number of faux Christians far exceeds the number of real ones!) of Believers vanish inexplicably, the planet will be sent into a temporary chaos that most eschatologists believe the Anti-Christ (i.e., the new-ish emerging world leader) will somehow be able to explain away sufficiently to those who don’t know their Scripture.
No, Mr. Trump is not the Anti-Christ.
He is to be the foil of the Anti-Christ.
Mr. Trump will be to this emerging world leader what Kim Jong-Un is to him: a less savvy mark that he can bully and rally his people against. If you think about it, perhaps America becoming a pariah for an emerging world government run by the devil’s chosen Anti-Christ may not be such a terrible thing! Unfortunately, if we have to live through the GOP’s America in the meantime, it won’t be a particularly pleasant alternative for most of us.
I’ve written about this before: God placed Donald John Trump in the presidency, as he did Mr. Obama, Mr. Bush, and for that matter every other president, premier, chancellor, prime minister and world leader in history. And it’s looking more and more like he is fulfilling precisely the role God placed him there to perform.
What seems more and more apparent is that by relegating our own nation to the sidelines during 2017, we have played out our Biblical role to perfection. The United States of America is about to become an afterthought, as the planet unites to begin the 3½ not-so-bad years and the 3½ terrible, catastrophic, nearly unsurvivable years of the Great Tribulation, ending in the Second Coming, the Return of Jesus Christ as King, and the literal end of human society and even life as we’ve known it.
“For then there will be great tribulation, such as has not been from the beginning of the world until now, no, and never will be. And if those days had not been cut short, no human being would be saved. But for the sake of the elect those days will be cut short.” - Matthew 24:21-22
In seven years plus maybe six to twelve months (more or less, or however many we have left), every knee will bend, and every knee will bow. Every person on the planet will either begin spending eternity in Hell or begin a new eternal existence with our Lord and Savior when the New Heaven and the New Earth appear.
♰
And this all sounds crazy to you, doesn’t it? The foolishness of a madman, you might say. The prayers of a fellow who’s so sick that he’s grasping at straws, hoping to be caught up to Heaven before he passes away conventionally of his illness. And in one sense, you’d be right. I agree with John:
“He who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!” - Revelation 22:20
What evidence do I have? Well, I have the Holy Spirit.
And I have a book. The Book.
That Book is the most reprinted, most read text on the planet. 1189 chapters, by forty human authors spread out over two thousand years, all guided by God’s Hand. And fully one-quarter of the material is prophecy: hundreds of pages of predictions, when you add it all up. Of that enormous quantity, every single prophecy so far has come true.
And this isn’t like Nostradamus, made up of vague phrases you can bend to mean almost anything and yet often they still make no sense. These are specific descriptions: the rise and fall of Alexander the Great, described in such detail in Daniel 11 that later skeptics argued it had to have been written after the fact (until earlier copies were discovered to prove its veracity); the precise tiny village (Bethlehem Ephrathah) where the birth of the Messiah would take place, known even then by Herod, the wise men and others awaiting His birth in Micah 5; and so forth. The Bible has been proven to be accurate with every prediction it’s ever given us, and the last unfulfilled prophecies are coming precisely true as we speak.
The countdown is nearly complete. Virtually all of the prerequisites for the rapture have happened. I could be completely off in my forecast of when Christ will call His elect Home - the Bible is inerrant, but I’m certainly not! It might be a few years from now, or maybe even twenty years down the road. It could be tomorrow. But it’s coming very soon, certainly within most of your lifetimes.
♰
There will be three roads that you can take.
Road One is by far the best option, and Romans 10:9-10 details it best:
“If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.”
Unfortunately, many people do the second without doing the first: they believe that Jesus is indeed God (which is the implication of believing in His Resurrection), but they don’t follow Him as LORD of their lives, meaning they don’t live by His Words. Be sure that you do BOTH. Many so-called “Christian” churches in 2017 fall under that “false prophet” label discussed earlier in this article, trying to make it seem easier than it is to be an actual Christian. (That's why it'll be "millions", not "billions". Tragically.)
Going to church is not a guarantee of salvation. Having Jesus and the Holy Spirit inside you is.
These people will miss the entire show. Without warning, someday soon (I believe in 2018 sometime, as I’ve said), the true Christians will be taken up to Heaven without the inconvenience of dying:
“But each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then at His coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the End, when He delivers the kingdom to God the Father…” - First Corinthians 15:23-24
But that last sentence is Road Two, which may be considered the “null” option, or the “complicit” option. Just go along with whatever the culture and the majority of the world tells you to do.
When the Believers leave, you’ll be told that it was some other kind of phenomenon - electromagnetic, perhaps, or some secret weapon of ‘the enemy’. I’ve no idea; frankly, I’m extremely curious what the Anti-Christ will tell you. But you’ll believe it, because it’s easier that way. And they’ll come together into a one-world government, and one-world economy, and that will be nice in its way.
Even when things get ugly a few years down the road, they won’t get ugly for you, because you’ve got the Mark of the Beast on your right hand (or maybe your forehead), which is how you can buy things in the new economy. Unfortunately, the Bible warned us that that mark is the Devil’s “branding” of you: he has bought you, and disqualified you from salvation. So when Christ comes at “the End, when He delivers the kingdom to God the Father,” only then will you understand that you were playing on the wrong team the entire time.
Only at the end, when He casts the devil and everyone who ‘went along with it’ into Hell, will you understand that Jesus Christ is God, that He is Lord, and He was to be obeyed rather than ignored.
Road Two has a very, very bad ending.
Road Three is the most difficult. Once the Rapture happens, Road One isn’t an option any more. You’re living in the Anti-Christ’s world now. However, if you realize this soon enough (and anytime in the first 3-4 years or so should be soon enough, before the “Mark of the Beast” is implemented for all commerce), you can still end up in Heaven instead of Hell.
How?
Step 1: Recognize that the Bible was right. If you remember ANYTHING about the Bible’s version of the End, and you notice millions of people disappear, immediately followed by the emergence of a new world government and leader, I really hope you can figure this part out yourself.
Step 2: Resist. That doesn’t mean you have to go “Rambo” on the world. But it does mean doing what you can to find out everything about the End Times from Scripture, and do whatever you need to in order to avoid falling in with the enemy’s camp. Even if it means…
Step 3: If necessary, die. That’s right. If you can survive all seven years without surrendering to the Anti-Christ, congratulations! But the other way to escape to Heaven during the Tribulation is to die as a martyr. That just means that if the solution to not falling into the enemy’s clutches is to be killed, don’t be afraid of it. You’ll die as a ‘saint’, and you’ll literally wake up a moment later in Heaven. (Revelation promises this, in chapter 6 and elsewhere.) Scary, I know. And you’ll have to endure a lot before that moment, undoubtedly. But in the (eternally) long term, it’s much better than Road Two.
♰
To summarize: The End Is Coming. Quickly. As a nation, we are “doomed” to the sidelines, but that’s immaterial to us as Christians (and perhaps even advantageous).
We must do whatever we can to make sure that not only will WE be safely on Road One, but that everyone we can influence will be there as well.
Non-Christians: find a Believer and let them help you, disciple you. (Read the back entries in our Act II Ministries blog or our new Selected Essays book for our help, but you’re really going to want a live person’s guidance as well.) Don’t wait! Time is short - Do it NOW!
Christians: Yes, you need to start being that annoying person who won’t leave your friends alone about Christ! If they were standing on the railroad tracks when a train was coming, you’d pester them non-stop until they were saved, wouldn’t you? Isn’t this even more crucial? DON’T leave anyone behind if you can help it!
Thank you for reading, thank you for believing, and thank you for sharing. May God be with each of you.
No comments:
Post a Comment