This is The End.

     OK, that's a little melodramatic. 

     But it's the end of the Blogspot site. As of today, January 31st, 2018, Act II Ministries is transferring its efforts over to a new and more powerful and accessible website, 

www.act2ministries.net .

      With the growth of our clientele, and the speed at which the Rapture is approaching, and thus the desperate need for saving as many people as we can before the Great Tribulation, we've been led to upgrade to a more accessible website, one that's easily found on the web, and one that we can do more than just write a few notes to you occasionally. 

     On act2ministries.net, we can not only post separate blogs for our Christian entries and our football related information, but there's also a stand-alone store for featuring our novels and non-fiction for download or purchase. In the future, we're also hoping to give you a chance to catch up with what's going on in our local ministry work, and any world events that may give us a clue to how imminent the Second Coming might be. (Spoiler alert: every Biblical pre-cursor sign has already happened. Nothing else has to happen before Christ comes to collect us all, although there are a few things which could happen before the Rapture - resumption of Temple worship services at the site of Solomon's Temple, for example. It won't have to be inside a new Temple, by the way. It might simply be at the Western Wall...)

     In the meantime, this site will remain open for the foreseeable future. I don't know how much of the material from the 2016-18 life of this Blogspot site needs to be transferred over, and if it's just as useful simply to link to it or not. The new site is up and functioning, but there are still bugs and incompleteness in it that I need to continue to work on over the next forever or so. (That's just how websites work, in my experience!)

     We want to thank Blogspot for their exemplary hosting of this site - and not just this site, but its predecessor, God, Jesus Christ, The Holy Spirit, which ran for a couple of years in 2013-15, and the original Following Football website, which ran a bit longer and was folded into Act II when this one started. (They also hosted our community bulletin board site for GPS MUSIC | Jerome back in the days when my late wife and I were trying to make a go of it selling my comps and arrangements on line.) We've been with Blogspot a long time, in computer years, and they've literally never failed us. 

    But it's time to go for broke - step out of our comfort zone and try to reach out beyond where we've been comfortable before. 

    Most importantly, thank you, loyal reader, for sticking with us through thick and thin, through "think" and "thank". We hope you join us over on the new site - and then that you'll join us Up Above, when the Lord Jesus Christ comes to pick up His Select Few to save us from the Tribulation the rest of humanity will be forced to bear. 

     We love you.

Is it fair to call it the "Trump Effect"?

While I try to spend my time in this column on Christian topics, the events happening in Washington DC occasionally cannot be ignored. I've expressed my considered opinion that while God is always in charge, He had a very specific reason for placing Mr. Trump in the office of POTUS at this moment in history, and this link and this more recent one will explain it to the uninformed.

But the manner and (lack of) decorum which he brought to the White House has palpably changed the interpersonal vibe between individuals with differing opinions in this nation. There is no middle ground now. I've mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: several former presidents have expressed their regret that the partisan nature of two-party politics has whittled the "moderate middle" down to virtually nothing in Congress, and in much of political thought in the media and in the culture as a whole. (Former Presidents Clinton, Bush 43, and Carter have all said as much in my hearing, thanks to pre-recording.) George Washington spent his entire Farewell Address pleading with those that came after him not to go down that road; yet the Hamiltonians and the Jeffersonians did exactly that. The names have changed, the roles have changed, but the battles continue - and in 2018, they're as divided as ever.

But even more than that (as I started to say before wandering on that rabbit trail!), it's the decorum that's gone missing under the influence of a leader who possesses none of it. Courtesy and diplomacy have been replaced by "My nuclear button is bigger than yours" and "she was bleeding out of her...". 

And that seeps into our everyday life. My students are prime examples: conversation with each other or with their elders are indistinguishable for politeness or appropriateness. Word choice is questionable at best. Lying is de riguer. Insubordination is a regular occurrence in my classroom these days, from students whose likely success in their lives ahead diminishes with every poor choice they make.

Which leads to the motivation for this particular melancholy point.

Long before the "election" of our current President (thank you, Electoral college), the "dumbing down" of America had been in full swing. It's unfortunately far too easy to predict the political preference of an American by their apparent educational level, although men and women alike who went to college and absorbed nothing except perhaps beer while there may have to be factored in. When evidence is plentiful and yet one continues to believe a falsehood, it's fair to question the innate intelligence of that person. When logic fails to sway a person from a belief that comes from unknown and questionable sources, that person's belief system can be legitimately questioned. When someone can look at two different people who commit the exact same action and judge them differently because of (fill in the blank: political party, skin color, personal persuasion), their hypocrisy has a root; increasingly, however, it's not so much that it's intentionally malicious as it is a personal blinding to objective reason.

And that lack of self-awareness has transformed the landscape of America. It is the widespread virulent disease form of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, the delusion of a person whose intelligence is too low for them to realize that there even exist things they don't know, much less what those things are. Our President, sad to say, is the role model for this. He honestly believes he knows more about everything in existence than everyone else in existence, and is occasionally brought to reality. It's why he refuses all intelligence briefings, preferring to rely on his own innate instincts (and Fox News). Think back to his 2017 conversation with Chinese President Xi Jinping, where in ten minutes he learned that he didn't know much after all:

Then Trump welcomed Chinese President Xi Jinping to his estate at Mar-a-Lago on April 6 — and everything changed. By the president’s own account, as told to the Wall Street Journal, the two men briefly chatted about the history of Chinese-Korean relations. The conversation rocked Trump’s world.

“After listening for 10 minutes, I realized it’s not so easy,” the president told the Journal. “I felt pretty strongly that they had a tremendous power [over] North Korea. ... But it’s not what you would think.”

Town (Jenny Town, Johns Hopkins University) called Trump’s approach to North Korea “naive” in our correspondence, and this is a perfect example of what she’s talking about. The president claims to have come to a profound realization about one of the most dangerous conflicts on earth after a 10-minute conversation with the leader of North Korea’s chief patron, which also happens to be the United States’ chief rival in East Asia.

 And that feeling long ago permeated the American populace, perhaps starting in force with the "Me Generation" era of the 1980's, where we were expected to rely on our innate skills and intelligence for the upward mobility of the only person that mattered. (As a Christian, you can probably articulate my rant of a response without my help, so I'll forego it for how. Suffice it to say, God would disagree.) Where it has brought us, in my 35 year career as a teacher which just happens to coincide with the time from that focus on "Me" to now, is the diminishing respect shown for education as a whole and the need for one's own education in particular. 

I have in my classroom as we speak about a half-dozen students (see yesterday's post for a more detailed description). Ostensibly, I am here to do more than just handle the administrative paperwork for them: I have decades of training in math and language arts instruction (admittedly, my music education training is far more advanced, but mostly irrelevant here), and am available at a moment's notice to assist any of these young men on any topic they have in front of them.

I've answered one academic question in two days.

In the meantime, I've dealt with a plethora of motivational conversations, imploring these lost souls to utilize the opportunity they've been given to turn their academic life around and get pointed back in the right direction, towards graduation. However, to be blunt, that doesn't interest any of them. So, rather than being a teacher, I get to be a prison guard instead.

When did school become a four-letter word? (Don't count letters - it's a metaphor.)

When did knowledge, education, and intelligence become dirty words? We look at the statistics about how many doctors and scientists we have to import, how many such students at our major higher ed institutions were coming in from outside the US (until we started making ourselves a pariah and putting out the "not welcome" sign), and bemoan the "brain drain" in this country - but it's exactly what we've strived for over the last few decades! The smart person on television is invariably the "nerd", the awkward dweeb stuck in the corner at the dance while the "cool dudes" who skip class all the time are lauded by their multiple good-looking babes on their arms.

It's far too late to meaningfully reverse these effects, in my opinion, before the Rapture comes and we have far more important issues to deal with (if you're still on the planet at that point). But it would be nice to leave behind a group of people who are able to read Revelation when it becomes relevant to their well-being.

Not that they'll read it then, either. That's too much of a "brainiac" thing to do.

New Year's Eve, 2017

This is post number 253 of this calendar year, and the 362nd of the (most recent) lifespan of the Act II Ministries blog. Over the course of December, there haven't been many new posts, as we were busy not just with Christmas but with the process of producing and starting to market the collection, "Selected Essays: Act II Ministries 2016-17", now in spiral bound book form and available from this website for a donation of $12 or more. Contact us through the comments for more information, or send your donation to the address on the blogsite with your own contact information so we can ship a copy to you ASAP. [Officially, it's my eleventh book published, with its companion "Selected Stories: Act II Ministries 2016-17", a collection of more personal tales printed in this blog, being the twelfth. I'm thinking of printing up a calendar with all twelve covers commemorated for my own use, as a manifestation of my still-extant sinful pride.] By the way, $12 covers the cost of production and mailing fairly precisely. We've no intention on profiting on this unless God says otherwise.

The other item that's kept me busy during the past week in particular is having proposed to the lovely and talented Dana, about whom I have spoken often and lovingly. It is to her infinite credit that I've learned to love to this extent again, after the death of my "soul mate" and partner in this ministry venture, Melissa Smith, three years ago this month. Dana, you are my last love, and the woman I want to be with when we are taken up by Christ when He splits the eastern sky.

Which brings me to the topic of this final post of 2017.

What would you do during 2018 if you knew it was going to be your last year on earth?

I'm very serious about this question, for many reasons. Those reasons don't matter right now. What would you DO? If I could guarantee that you had no more than twelve months - that you wouldn't be here to celebrate New Year's Rockin' Eve 2019 with Ryan Seacrest and the corpse of Dick Clark - would you live your remaining life differently?

The pat answer, of course, is that we are to live every day as if we could die tomorrow, but that's impractical beyond belief. The closest actual advice I've ever heard on this topic that was functionally useful was to plan like you'll live forever, and live like there's no tomorrow.

But generally, we don't do even that. 

This is not your standard "Carpe Diem!" post. This is a serious admonition that the End is Almost Here. If you've followed my writing over the last fifteen months, or really just the last few months (and God bless you if you have, as erratic a poster as I've been given my failing health!), then you know where I'm coming from.  

All the signs are in place for the "Rapture of Christ's Church" in the imminent future. There are no longer any more "signs" necessary, nothing else needed before the Son of Man appears without warning and snatches up the smaller-than-commonly-expected number of Believers from the surface of this world and takes us Home. 

We use the word "snatches" because Jesus Himself told us it would be sudden. Here is part of the Olivet Discourse, Matthew 24 (verses 15-19) →

15“So when you see the abomination of desolation spoken of by the prophet Daniel, standing in the holy place (let the reader understand), 16then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. 17Let the one who is on the housetop not go down to take what is in his house, 18and let the one who is in the field not turn back to take his cloak. 19And alas for women who are pregnant and for those who are nursing infants in those days!

Several things to note here. 

"The abomination that causes desolation" is the final step in the countdown to the rapture, the only one left. What that may be is unclear. Many have speculated it to be something about the not-yet reconstructed Third Temple, but at this point that seems a wistful dream at best. More likely, it's some desecration of an already-extant holy site; in my mind, the Western Wall is the obvious candidate. Regardless, when it happens, it's too late to be saved and catch the first train out of town! Verses 16-19 make it clear there won't be a delay after that for us to "catch our breath" or "pack our bags". (What would you possibly want to pack to go to Heaven?)

"Let the reader understand" - is not added later, but is part of the original quotation. Jesus is expecting His Words to be written down and passed on to future generations. That seems an amazingly profound thought for Jesus to have at the moment.

"Alas for women who are pregnant and for those who are nursing infants" - Here's a thought some of you may not have come across. Jesus says on many occasions that to enter into Heaven, we must be like them: staying in Matthew, here's 19:14 →

14but Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven.” 


For to such belongs the Kingdom of Heaven! So not only will the children GO to Heaven, they'll OWN it! So, undoubtedly, the children below a certain age (presumably the age where that child can make a consenting choice) will be taken up unconditionally. Alas for pregnant women and those nursing infants indeed! If they're not saved, their child will be snatched up without them! (I'm assuming that you realize: no matter what our governments may say, to God those babies within their mothers' wombs are already living human beings worthy of salvation. Psalm 139:13 → 

 For you formed my inward parts;
you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.

As the memesters would say, "Your argument is invalid"!) 

I've written about the impending Rapture before. God has pressed me to talk about it non-stop for the next however-many months we have left. So, that's the primary reason I have for stressing this immediacy issue.

But personally, I have a second one: my health is steadily deteriorating to a frightening level.

Since six months ago, I've lost a great deal of stamina and develop pain much faster. It takes more medication to beat that pain back, and I've had to add three medicines to my daily regimen. While I've been able to stay on the job officially, long-time readers know it's only through the tireless efforts of my teaching assistant Wendy that I'm able to survive day to day (and even so, I can't generally make it through more than three days in a week). Unfortunately, I've recebtly learned that in order to retire on disability from our state's school system and earn disability retirement payments, I have to be off the payroll for five months before even the first test of my ability or inability will be made.

Screw that. God's coming sooner than that! I'm currently planning to just keep teaching until He Returns or until I drop! This is another "Holy Spirit" thing, understand: it's going to be a race to see if I live long enough to see the Rapture, or if the pain gets to me first.

So, for me, it becomes very simple. 2018 will be my last year on the planet, and frankly I can't wait to get to Heaven! 

BUT.... what am I supposed to do with the time left to me here?!?

God didn't leave me here "accidentally", any more than He left YOU here "accidentally". What are we supposed to do to help encourage the lost to come to Christ in these last few months? For me, this blog is an important venue, and I'm pledging to try and post something every day until the End. (I don't make "New Year's Resolutions" generally, because having spent my entire life in the school system, I don't think of January as the "new year"! I've always made those resolutions in August. This year, however, warrants an adjustment.)

I also need to focus this blog in more on the essentials: the salvation of the lost (both the ones reading the blog and the ones you may have in your lives and want to help save) and the urgency of the issue.  The rest of my duties, like always, start from listening to God in prayer and interpreting what He wants me to do. That's not always easy for me to do. Like most pray-ers, I tend to bring my own desires into the prayer circle, when I need to listen more carefully. 

What about you? What do you find God is leading you towards in 2018? Don't waste a DAY of the time you have left, because there aren't very many!    

Christians, we're down to our last few months on earth!

          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 North Korea, 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 as Christians 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, I feel very confident about the following prediction:  

        My daughters are eleven, and turn twelve this month. 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 a more in-depth look at those already-fulfilled prophetic verses, 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 while 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 essay. 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

         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.)

          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." -

          ...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. Next 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 Anti-Christ.

          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 - “Sowhen 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."    

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           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 Anti-Christ 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.

[Note: this is a revision of a three-part series published starting on March 21, 2017.] 

America's Role in the Upcoming Tribulation Has Just Been Defined.

“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.