This is not a rant against Mr. Trump. God put Mr. Trump in the White House, not the electorate. This is not a warning against bombing Syria, nuclear war or impending climate change. We are expected to deal with these issues ourselves and with prayers to God. However, ultimately God is in control of all events, and our ending has already been written.
And our script is down to the last few scenes.
When people ask me why I believe the Bible is true, there are two reasons I give. The first is very simple: God tells me it's true, and God speaks through the Holy Spirit to me (as He does to every Believer). He responds to my prayers. His control of my life and direct and indirect movement of the path my life has taken speaks more loudly than anything in writing could.
But the second reason is the fulfillment of hundreds and hundreds of verses of prophecies in Scripture already, from cover to cover. A full 26% of the Bible is prophetic, and there has not been a single prediction which has not come true precisely except for the ones involving the End Times, which have yet to manifest. That's the only thing left in history, as far as God is concerned. The Rapture, the Great Tribulation, and the Second Coming.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with End Times prophecy, let me help you feel better about it:
1) That's not unusual. Very few churches deal with it, because most pastors either find it confusing, or don't believe Revelation, or they just aren't in tune with the Holy Spirit or world events. And if they aren't comfortable with the topic, how can you expect them to preach about it?
2) It's not nearly as difficult as that makes it seem. As long as you know where to look, the sequence of events that lead up to the Rapture of the Believers are relatively clean-cut.
3) What we need to know isn't much. AND what comes after the Believers take us Home, frankly, doesn't matter to us, because we'll be GONE - watching from Heaven as Satan plays seven years of his torturous games with all those people who didn't follow the Lord's instructions and repent of their sins. After that, Christ will Come once again and the remaining residents will be saved or condemned, and the old earth will be closed for business. But all we have to know is the lead up to the Rapture, which is almost complete.
That's right: just about anyone who's studied eschatology, the examination of the Biblical End Times (including me - God called me to that the first week or two I was saved, much to my confusion at the time), agrees that almost all the boxes have been ticked. Very little remains to be done, and the clock is ticking for a few of the time-dependent predictors to expire soon unless He comes for us in the next few years.
My health is poor, as I've recently written about. But I have a goal of hanging on until the Lord brings the two percent of us home together...and as close as I might be to the end of my physical life, I think I can hold out until then.
How long am I talking about? Christ famously told His disciples in Matthew 24:36, But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only. We cannot know the exact date, no matter how logical a particular day might seem to us. But for reasons I'll explain tomorrow, I feel very confident about the following prediction:
My daughters turned twelve this December. Presuming they maintain their salvation with the Lord, they will not remain on the Earth for their thirteenth birthday.
That's right. I expect that Christ will take us home before 2019. (Very possibly LONG before 2019.) And THAT means it's ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL that YOU solidify your salvation immediately, and that we all help bring as many of our friends along as we can. [If you think I'm crazy, but you believe in the Bible, either you haven't actually read the relevant sections of the Bible OR you haven't paid attention to what's going on around the Holy Land. If you think I'm crazy and you don't believe in the Bible, you're probably not reading this.]
For homework, take a look at Daniel 11: God's Timeline. It may not be perfectly accurate, but he/she/it has got the key element correct: Daniel 11 is the key prophecy, and it's almost certainly closing in on fulfillment as far as we Christians are concerned.
Regardless of what else is going on
in the world, this is the most important subject in the world. Nothing that
happens in the United States, no political scandal or policy they could
possibly enact could do to or for you what the Scriptures tell us will happen
when the End Times arrive - and what I'm going to share with you here is a
portion of the reasoning many of us who study these things have that makes us
absolutely certain that we are no more than a few years at most from the End of
Days.
I understand how melodramatic that
sounds, and if it makes you more comfortable, the Lord Himself told us that it
would sound foolish, as I talked about just a few days ago.
If you read this blog regularly, you probably already take the Bible at its
Word, but as I mentioned earlier, it's almost impossible for a rational person to realize how
many of the Bible's prophecies came true to the letter - i.e., ALL of them! -
and not think that maybe there's something deep and truthful about the
Scriptures.
- Daniel 11's first manifestation of truth (verse 2-35) matches the conquest and postscript of Alexander The Great to the dot and tittle. (Always loved that expression!)
- Jesus' predictions about the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD ("Not one stone will remain atop another"; the Olivet discourses in three of the four gospels).
- Isaiah and Jeremiah's forecasts of the exile of the people of Israel for exactly seventy years (by the way, the choice of 70 years was to match the missed Sabbaths of 490 years of disobedience. The More You Know...)
- Daniel 9:24-27, which lays out the End Times general form, has already predicted the 49 year gap between the first re-settlement of Jerusalem by those exiles and the reconstruction of the Temple AND the precisely 434 years (to the DAY) until the Triumphal Entry of the Anointed King into Jerusalem (where He would be "cut off").
- Throughout the Old Testament, there are by some counts (meaning, I haven't personally done the counting) close to one hundred specific prophecies about the Messiah, including the specific generation in which He would be born (from six hundred years BC) and the insignificant town of His birth (Bethlehem Ephathah, so tiny that it needed the 'Ephathah' to distinguish it from two larger towns of the same name in Israel). The odds of any dozen of those details being exactly correct are in the quadrillions - and yet every single one of them was fulfilled to the letter. (Tittles and dots, oh my...)
There are many, many more, but the
point is made. Either you believe the Bible or you don't. From here on
out, I've got to assume you believe it, and move on to the rest of the
argument.
Why now? Most generations, including the very first one after
Christ's death, thought that they might be the one which saw His Second
Coming, which He promised during His forty days on earth following
His resurrection, in case you thought that might have been the Second Coming.
Nope. Each generation of Christians has prayed to see the Rapture, but
many of the details required in the Scriptures for the End Times to begin were
not possible. Let's look at some of those, and show you why this
generation is the privileged one...
- The Christian gospel must have reached all corners of the Earth. (Mt 24:14) Only in the era of the Internet and the ability of the missionary community to reach those figurative corners of the planet can this have been fulfilled - and it has.
- False prophets bring heresies to the world in the name of Christ, smooth talkers whose goal is accruing money. (2Ptr 2:1) While false prophets have always existed, only in the era of televangelists and the prosperity gospel has this manifested at an epidemic level.
- In Revelation 11, the entire world watches the death and resurrection of the Two Witnesses. Only in the era of global telecommunication could this happen - when John wrote down Revelation, the fastest mode of communication was horseback.
- At what previous time in history could all humanity be destroyed at once? Yet in Mt 24:22, Christ says "if those days (of tribulation) had not been cut short, no human being would be saved." The End Times require exactly today's technology.
- Specifically, Zechariah prophesied about something he himself couldn't imagine: nuclear devastation. "Their flesh shall dissolve while they stand on their feet. Their eyes shall dissolve in their sockets. And their tongues shall dissolve in their mouths." (Zech 14:12) Nothing before 1945 would do that.
- When the AntiChrist begins his rule (after the Rapture of the Believers), there will very quickly exist a global government and a global economy with a global banking system. The latter exists today; the former could be created through the UN in a matter of weeks.
- The increasing ethnic conflicts (Mark 13:8, for ex) and terrorism (the word Jesus used for what is usually translated "fearful sights" in Luke 21:11 is also translated 'terror') is indicative of the End Times.
- Daniel 12:4 describes our world today: The final prophecy (of Daniel 11) will be shut and sealed "until the time of the end. Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase." In the information age, intercontinental transportation has never been more prevalent.
- In Revelation 9, two hundred million mounted troops are released to storm towards Israel. When John wrote out Revelation, there weren't that many people on Earth! Today, China has a standing army of three hundred million.
There are many more, far too many for the scope of this piece. But all that these prove is that the
End Times couldn't have happened until now. Why do we think that there's
a reason to expect the Rapture and Great Tribulation in the immediate
future?
Here's why: Israel.
"Before she was in
labor she gave birth;
before her pain came upon her she delivered a son.
Who has heard such a thing?
Who has seen such things?
Shall a land be born in one day?
Shall a nation be brought forth in one moment?
For as soon as Zion was in labor she brought forth her children" - Isaiah 66:7-8
before her pain came upon her she delivered a son.
Who has heard such a thing?
Who has seen such things?
Shall a land be born in one day?
Shall a nation be brought forth in one moment?
For as soon as Zion was in labor she brought forth her children" - Isaiah 66:7-8
Who would predict 2600
years ago that Zion - Israel - would be born in a day? How can such a thing
happen, especially since Israel already existed at the time of the
prophecy! But Israel, modern Israel, WAS born in a day: May
14th, 1948. Jews regathered in Israel (Isaiah 11:12; moreso Ezekiel 37 and
38) then but even more so recently. Israel would be a wasteland (Ezekiel
36) - and was for 1800+ years! - and would at the very end become not
only a nation but "Israel shall
blossom and put forth shoots
and fill the whole world with fruit." (Isaiah 27:6). (Israel is now is a net exporter of produce.)
and fill the whole world with fruit." (Isaiah 27:6). (Israel is now is a net exporter of produce.)
Even the outlandish
prediction of Zephaniah 3:9 -
“For at that time I will change the speech of the peoples
to a pure speech,
that all of them may call upon the name of the Lord
and serve him with one accord." -
“For at that time I will change the speech of the peoples
to a pure speech,
that all of them may call upon the name of the Lord
and serve him with one accord." -
has come true. In the
decades preceding 1948, even before the Holocaust, there was a Zionist movement
to revive the dead Hebrew language. When Israel became a nation in 1948, Hebrew
was declared the national language and recreated from whole cloth. (A ton of
new words had to be invented, for things like "airplane" and
"computer" and so forth!) For the first and only time in world history, a dead language
was resurrected and re-established. Only God could make that happen. (By the way, there are no swear words in modern
Hebrew. A "pure language", indeed!)
But the kicker is this
paragraph from the Olivet Discourse, Christ's description of the coming of the End Times. Unusual for
the three synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke - the
gospels which go about telling Jesus' story in a similar manner, because John's
came later and had a completely different format), maybe even unique
among the three, the description of Christ's words here is virtually identical:
“From the fig tree
learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts out its leaves,
you know that summer is near. So also, when you see these things taking place,
you know that he is near, at the very gates. Truly, I say to you, this
generation will not pass away until all these things take place. Heaven and
earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away." Mark 13:28-31.
He's just finished the
description of the "abomination that causes desolation", the
AntiChrist, and the Rapture ("And
then they will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory.
And then he will send out the angels and gather his elect from the four winds,
from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven." v. 26-27). The "fig tree" always represents Israel in Biblical prophecy -
as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts out its leaves, as it has now -
and when you see these things taking place, it's time. But this generation that
sees the branches become tender will not pass away until all these
things take place. That means that the generation that saw Israel become
a nation - born in 1948 - will not pass away until the Rapture comes
(described in v 26-27).
What's a "generation"? You cannot pin a date on God. (The very
next verse tells us so, in each gospel. Mark 13:32-33 says, "But
concerning that day or that hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven,
nor the Son, but only the Father. Be on guard, keep awake. For you do not know
when the time will come.") But
we can make an educated guess based on Scriptural evidence, and the Man of God
himself tells us in Psalm 90, verse 10: "The
years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty."
Seventy years from 1948
is 2018. THIS year.
Moses gave us a ten-year
window, but as we'll read in a moment, events are moving quickly in Israel's vicinity, and it's hard to imagine them extending much farther than next
year in any circumstance. In fact, let's look at the signs that the
world is reaching that moment Christ and Daniel and others have warned
us about: the abomination that created the desolation. The AntiChrist.
The Scripture that we noted was the one in all three of the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), which was virtually identical. And that's notable because those gospels were significantly different from top to tail, which is why all three are in the Bible to begin with. Matthew wrote his gospel specifically to persuade his Jewish readers that Jesus was the long-prophesied Messiah. Mark was the memoirist of the apostle Peter, and he wrote about the deeds of Christ, rather than the teaching of the most famous rabbi in history. Luke wasn't even present for the ministry of Jesus: he was a Gentile doctor and historian who collected from a wide variety of sources to put together a historical document for a non-Jewish audience. (John apparently wrote his gospel several years afterwards, in hopes of filling in some blanks in the three dominant histories of his Great Friend, and wrote of eight specific miracles Christ wrought. He therefore did not include the Discourse at all.)
Yet all three quote much of the Olivet Discourse, and the fragment I quoted in yesterday's post is identical in all three gospels. Matthew 24:32-35, Mark 13:28-31, and Luke 21:29-32 are almost exact (except for the introductory phrase in Luke 21:29). This speaks to the importance of the Lord's message: This is the most important sign to look for.
And as we pointed out, that sign has almost expired.
But there are more details that we can look at, and Jesus told us point blank where to look - “So when you see the abomination of desolation spoken of by the prophet Daniel, standing in the holy place (let the reader understand), then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains." (Matthew 24:15-16). The interesting phrase there to me is the parenthetical, "let the reader understand". Not the listener - the reader! Christ was speaking to His disciples, yet He is specifically warning those who would read His words later! This warning was not for His followers at the time: it was for those who would learn the gospels through text, which wouldn't even be in the next few centuries! ONLY in the days of William Tyndale 1400 years later would the Bible become a book that the common men read.
And He spoke of a specific book of the Old Testament to look at for clues to the coming of the "abomination of desolation" - the writing of the Prophet Daniel. And what did the angel warn Daniel about his prophetic dreams? "But you, Daniel, shut up the words and seal the book, until the time of the end." (Dn 12:4a)
We understand these prophecies now because we see the signs around us...because this is "the time of the end."
There are four significant dream-prophecies in the book of Daniel. Daniel 2 describes King Nebuchadnezzar's dream of the four kingdoms, starting with that king's Babylonian empire and ending with the kingdom of iron and clay. Otherwise, there isn't much there. The other three, the visions of Daniel himself, are another matter.
Daniel 7 contains this explanation of his vision in the first year of Belshazzar's reign, regarding that fourth kingdom - these are verses 24-27:
As for the ten horns, out of this kingdom ten kings shall arise,
and another shall arise after them;
he shall be different from the former ones, and shall put down three kings.
He shall speak words against the Most High, and shall wear out the saints of the Most High,
and shall think to change the times and the law;
and they shall be given into his hand for a time, times, and half a time.
But the court shall sit in judgment, and his dominion shall be taken away,
to be consumed and destroyed to the end.
And the kingdom and the dominion and the greatness of the kingdoms under the whole heaven
shall be given to the people of the saints of the Most High;
his kingdom shall be an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey him.
In short, this defines the AntiChrist as the king who rises from the ten kingdoms (most presume these to be Europe for reasons too lengthy to explain here) and who rules for 3 1/2 years ("time, times, and half a time" - 1+2+1/2=3.5), before being taken down and given to Heaven and the Messiah in the end. This is the first time we see a script for "the End".
But there's more. In Daniel 9, only four verses speak to the vision of Daniel, but they're biggies. 9:24-27 is probably the most analyzed set of verses in the OT. All of the opening of the chapter is dedicated to how difficult it was to get Daniel this interpretation, so listen up...
“Seventy weeks are decreed about your people and your holy city, to finish the transgression, to put an end to sin, and to atone for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal both vision and prophet, and to anoint a most holy place. Know therefore and understand that from the going out of the word to restore and build Jerusalem to the coming of an anointed one, a prince, there shall be seven weeks. Then for sixty-two weeks it shall be built again with squares and moat, but in a troubled time. And after the sixty-two weeks, an anointed one shall be cut off and shall have nothing. And the people of the prince who is to come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary. Its end shall come with a flood, and to the end there shall be war. Desolations are decreed. And he shall make a strong covenant with many for one week, and for half of the week he shall put an end to sacrifice and offering. And on the wing of abominations shall come one who makes desolate, until the decreed end is poured out on the desolator.”
To condense this is difficult, but here we go: The seventy "weeks" are weeks of years, or in other words groups of seven years. (The original Hebrew is seventy "sevens".) The seventy weeks are divided into a group of seven (49 years), which is how long it took to "restore and build Jerusalem" from scratch for the returning exiles; sixty-two more weeks (434 more years) until an anointed one (Jesus) shall be cut off (killed), which happened 434 years to the week. (The Triumphal Entry took place exactly at 434 years. Amazing.) The last week does NOT come right away, which frankly bothers me, but then the OT prophets were generally unable to distinguish between First and Second Coming events anyway (look at the list in the first sentence: three took place at Christ's first visit; three are planned for His return). In the final week, the AntiChrist will make a covenant with "many" for one week (the last 7 years) and during the last half of that (3 1/2 years) he "shall put an end to sacrifice and offering", meaning that's when he will start the final attempt to eliminate the Jews once and for all.
But we still don't have a detailed watch list leading into the End Times, do we? Is it really going to sneak up on us completely? Christ told us to watch for it - surely He would give us a way to DO that, right? Well, Daniel does, in chapter 11, which fools a lot of people for one simple reason: it's already been fulfilled! Daniel's 11:2-35 were already a perfect description of the rise, fall, and aftermath of Alexander The Great in the second century before Christ, resulting in the rising up of Judas Maccabeus as the emancipator of the Hebrew people until Pax Romana (the "Roman Peace" - 'do it Rome's way and nobody gets hurt') led to a tense but still relatively free life for Israel. The problem with this is that it left the last ten verses, 11:36-45, unused and unresolved, without explanation. They appear to speak to the End Times, and have generally been interpreted as "occurring after a ridiculous jump", but never seemed to make sense.
Until now. Because, unbeknownst to anyone until the current days, Daniel 11 is one of those dual Scripture prophecies that show up rarely but more than just this once. It turns out that we can place every one of those verses in context with relationship to the ISIS 'caliphate' and they work at least as well as they did with Alexander. (The full explanation is done on daniel11truth.com, and is explored in such great detail and depth that I won't try to reproduce it here - once you're done here, go read the work done on that site for the closest explanation available.)
The key verse for our purposes becomes the one that matches perfectly with Christ's warning about watching for the abomination that causes desolation in Matthew 24:15. In Daniel 11, that shows up in verse 31: "Forces from him shall appear and profane the temple and fortress, and shall take away the regular burnt offering. And they shall set up the abomination that makes desolate." So, what's happened over the last few years, as this pattern has become apparent (for me, it was three years ago, around verse 22 or 23), is the tracking of the events in the middle east that may or may not fulfill the verses of prophecy given to Daniel. (Terminology is sometimes vague, especially when 2600 years and two languages intervene.)
So, where are we right now, if we're waiting to hear verse 31?
Verse 30 is already complete. The next verse could come at any moment.
That's right. We have passed every single landmark which Daniel told us to watch for in and around the Holy Land before the Rapture happens. The very next event in Biblical history will be the sixth seal of the Lord's scroll, which He began opening immediately after His Crucifixion (in Revelation 6:1) and which triggers the exact same events (Rev 6:12-14) as Jesus describes to us in Matthew 24:29-31 - the earthquakes, the full moon of blood, the stars and sky and mountains having unprecedented disruptions. There is NO QUESTION that the two sets of verses describe the exact same event - the Rapture of the Believers, because the next thing we see, in Revelation 7:9, is the great multitude "from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the Throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands" - the saved.
And if YOU are among the saved, you too in the very near future will be counted among "the ones coming out of the Great Tribulation...they (who) have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb" - Jesus Christ, your savior and mine. "They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; the sun shall not strike them, nor any scorching heat. For the Lamb in the midst of the Throne will be their Shepherd, and He will guide them to springs of living water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes." (verses 16-17)
Are you among us, friend? Will you be saved from the seven years of hell on earth, and then the eternity of the real hell that will be far worse? All it takes to avoid that horrible fate is to say with your mouth and believe in your heart that Jesus IS your Lord and Savior. If you're one of those who's put it off while you lived a life of sin - your playtime is up. He is Coming, and He is Coming literally ANY DAY now.
P.S. - One of the things you'll notice when you go to daniel11truth.com is that it's very obviously not a scam for money. You may not agree with the methodology or the conclusions - and believe me, I've studied them hard for three years: I do believe in both - but you won't question the site's honesty. Like me, they just want to see as many people saved as possible, and we are getting frighteningly or ecstatically close, depending on how you look at it. Go over there and spend some time digging through what they have to say. Then revisit my columns this week, and make the only decision a rational person can do. Give your life to Christ before it's too late, because it just about is.
The Scripture that we noted was the one in all three of the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), which was virtually identical. And that's notable because those gospels were significantly different from top to tail, which is why all three are in the Bible to begin with. Matthew wrote his gospel specifically to persuade his Jewish readers that Jesus was the long-prophesied Messiah. Mark was the memoirist of the apostle Peter, and he wrote about the deeds of Christ, rather than the teaching of the most famous rabbi in history. Luke wasn't even present for the ministry of Jesus: he was a Gentile doctor and historian who collected from a wide variety of sources to put together a historical document for a non-Jewish audience. (John apparently wrote his gospel several years afterwards, in hopes of filling in some blanks in the three dominant histories of his Great Friend, and wrote of eight specific miracles Christ wrought. He therefore did not include the Discourse at all.)
Yet all three quote much of the Olivet Discourse, and the fragment I quoted in yesterday's post is identical in all three gospels. Matthew 24:32-35, Mark 13:28-31, and Luke 21:29-32 are almost exact (except for the introductory phrase in Luke 21:29). This speaks to the importance of the Lord's message: This is the most important sign to look for.
And as we pointed out, that sign has almost expired.
But there are more details that we can look at, and Jesus told us point blank where to look - “So when you see the abomination of desolation spoken of by the prophet Daniel, standing in the holy place (let the reader understand), then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains." (Matthew 24:15-16). The interesting phrase there to me is the parenthetical, "let the reader understand". Not the listener - the reader! Christ was speaking to His disciples, yet He is specifically warning those who would read His words later! This warning was not for His followers at the time: it was for those who would learn the gospels through text, which wouldn't even be in the next few centuries! ONLY in the days of William Tyndale 1400 years later would the Bible become a book that the common men read.
And He spoke of a specific book of the Old Testament to look at for clues to the coming of the "abomination of desolation" - the writing of the Prophet Daniel. And what did the angel warn Daniel about his prophetic dreams? "But you, Daniel, shut up the words and seal the book, until the time of the end." (Dn 12:4a)
We understand these prophecies now because we see the signs around us...because this is "the time of the end."
There are four significant dream-prophecies in the book of Daniel. Daniel 2 describes King Nebuchadnezzar's dream of the four kingdoms, starting with that king's Babylonian empire and ending with the kingdom of iron and clay. Otherwise, there isn't much there. The other three, the visions of Daniel himself, are another matter.
Daniel 7 contains this explanation of his vision in the first year of Belshazzar's reign, regarding that fourth kingdom - these are verses 24-27:
As for the ten horns, out of this kingdom ten kings shall arise,
and another shall arise after them;
he shall be different from the former ones, and shall put down three kings.
He shall speak words against the Most High, and shall wear out the saints of the Most High,
and shall think to change the times and the law;
and they shall be given into his hand for a time, times, and half a time.
But the court shall sit in judgment, and his dominion shall be taken away,
to be consumed and destroyed to the end.
And the kingdom and the dominion and the greatness of the kingdoms under the whole heaven
shall be given to the people of the saints of the Most High;
his kingdom shall be an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey him.
In short, this defines the AntiChrist as the king who rises from the ten kingdoms (most presume these to be Europe for reasons too lengthy to explain here) and who rules for 3 1/2 years ("time, times, and half a time" - 1+2+1/2=3.5), before being taken down and given to Heaven and the Messiah in the end. This is the first time we see a script for "the End".
But there's more. In Daniel 9, only four verses speak to the vision of Daniel, but they're biggies. 9:24-27 is probably the most analyzed set of verses in the OT. All of the opening of the chapter is dedicated to how difficult it was to get Daniel this interpretation, so listen up...
“Seventy weeks are decreed about your people and your holy city, to finish the transgression, to put an end to sin, and to atone for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal both vision and prophet, and to anoint a most holy place. Know therefore and understand that from the going out of the word to restore and build Jerusalem to the coming of an anointed one, a prince, there shall be seven weeks. Then for sixty-two weeks it shall be built again with squares and moat, but in a troubled time. And after the sixty-two weeks, an anointed one shall be cut off and shall have nothing. And the people of the prince who is to come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary. Its end shall come with a flood, and to the end there shall be war. Desolations are decreed. And he shall make a strong covenant with many for one week, and for half of the week he shall put an end to sacrifice and offering. And on the wing of abominations shall come one who makes desolate, until the decreed end is poured out on the desolator.”
To condense this is difficult, but here we go: The seventy "weeks" are weeks of years, or in other words groups of seven years. (The original Hebrew is seventy "sevens".) The seventy weeks are divided into a group of seven (49 years), which is how long it took to "restore and build Jerusalem" from scratch for the returning exiles; sixty-two more weeks (434 more years) until an anointed one (Jesus) shall be cut off (killed), which happened 434 years to the week. (The Triumphal Entry took place exactly at 434 years. Amazing.) The last week does NOT come right away, which frankly bothers me, but then the OT prophets were generally unable to distinguish between First and Second Coming events anyway (look at the list in the first sentence: three took place at Christ's first visit; three are planned for His return). In the final week, the AntiChrist will make a covenant with "many" for one week (the last 7 years) and during the last half of that (3 1/2 years) he "shall put an end to sacrifice and offering", meaning that's when he will start the final attempt to eliminate the Jews once and for all.
But we still don't have a detailed watch list leading into the End Times, do we? Is it really going to sneak up on us completely? Christ told us to watch for it - surely He would give us a way to DO that, right? Well, Daniel does, in chapter 11, which fools a lot of people for one simple reason: it's already been fulfilled! Daniel's 11:2-35 were already a perfect description of the rise, fall, and aftermath of Alexander The Great in the second century before Christ, resulting in the rising up of Judas Maccabeus as the emancipator of the Hebrew people until Pax Romana (the "Roman Peace" - 'do it Rome's way and nobody gets hurt') led to a tense but still relatively free life for Israel. The problem with this is that it left the last ten verses, 11:36-45, unused and unresolved, without explanation. They appear to speak to the End Times, and have generally been interpreted as "occurring after a ridiculous jump", but never seemed to make sense.
Until now. Because, unbeknownst to anyone until the current days, Daniel 11 is one of those dual Scripture prophecies that show up rarely but more than just this once. It turns out that we can place every one of those verses in context with relationship to the ISIS 'caliphate' and they work at least as well as they did with Alexander. (The full explanation is done on daniel11truth.com, and is explored in such great detail and depth that I won't try to reproduce it here - once you're done here, go read the work done on that site for the closest explanation available.)
The key verse for our purposes becomes the one that matches perfectly with Christ's warning about watching for the abomination that causes desolation in Matthew 24:15. In Daniel 11, that shows up in verse 31: "Forces from him shall appear and profane the temple and fortress, and shall take away the regular burnt offering. And they shall set up the abomination that makes desolate." So, what's happened over the last few years, as this pattern has become apparent (for me, it was three years ago, around verse 22 or 23), is the tracking of the events in the middle east that may or may not fulfill the verses of prophecy given to Daniel. (Terminology is sometimes vague, especially when 2600 years and two languages intervene.)
So, where are we right now, if we're waiting to hear verse 31?
Verse 30 is already complete. The next verse could come at any moment.
That's right. We have passed every single landmark which Daniel told us to watch for in and around the Holy Land before the Rapture happens. The very next event in Biblical history will be the sixth seal of the Lord's scroll, which He began opening immediately after His Crucifixion (in Revelation 6:1) and which triggers the exact same events (Rev 6:12-14) as Jesus describes to us in Matthew 24:29-31 - the earthquakes, the full moon of blood, the stars and sky and mountains having unprecedented disruptions. There is NO QUESTION that the two sets of verses describe the exact same event - the Rapture of the Believers, because the next thing we see, in Revelation 7:9, is the great multitude "from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the Throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands" - the saved.
And if YOU are among the saved, you too in the very near future will be counted among "the ones coming out of the Great Tribulation...they (who) have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb" - Jesus Christ, your savior and mine. "They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; the sun shall not strike them, nor any scorching heat. For the Lamb in the midst of the Throne will be their Shepherd, and He will guide them to springs of living water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes." (verses 16-17)
Are you among us, friend? Will you be saved from the seven years of hell on earth, and then the eternity of the real hell that will be far worse? All it takes to avoid that horrible fate is to say with your mouth and believe in your heart that Jesus IS your Lord and Savior. If you're one of those who's put it off while you lived a life of sin - your playtime is up. He is Coming, and He is Coming literally ANY DAY now.
P.S. - One of the things you'll notice when you go to daniel11truth.com is that it's very obviously not a scam for money. You may not agree with the methodology or the conclusions - and believe me, I've studied them hard for three years: I do believe in both - but you won't question the site's honesty. Like me, they just want to see as many people saved as possible, and we are getting frighteningly or ecstatically close, depending on how you look at it. Go over there and spend some time digging through what they have to say. Then revisit my columns this week, and make the only decision a rational person can do. Give your life to Christ before it's too late, because it just about is.
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