Saturdays are no longer my favorites like they were when I worked full time in my jobs in advertising and public relations. Back then, I welcomed the relaxation that came with the day immediately following hectic weeks of meetings with clients and concocting and conducting campaigns for corporations to get products and services in front of the public.

Nowadays, Saturdays bore me, because I like to start my days early by listening to TV programs while sipping coffee. The programs are mostly preacher boys (as they’re sometimes called here in the south) such as Dr. David Jeremiah, Dr. Robert Jeffress, Les Feldick, and others who present daily programs. These regularly scheduled programs aren’t on my satellite system on Saturdays. My routine is disrupted.

However, a past Saturday, I was pleasantly surprised while clicking through the channels when I heard a program that was presenting a documentary that piqued my interest. It was on Daystar Television, and it featured of a number of men and a couple of women talking about how true Bible prophecy is a dwindling topic in most all churches in America.

I suspected who a couple of the men were, but never knew for sure, because, of course, I’m now blind. I started watching somewhere in the middle of the documentary, so didn’t have a frame of reference for those speaking in brief clips.

I did think I recognized my dear friend Jan Markell—she will have to let me know—but she was the only one who sounded familiar.

Those who addressed the matters involved were true Bible teachers, to be sure. They outlined precisely how the churches in America today are avoiding talk of prophecy and of Christ’s return. Pastors, they correctly surmised, are most afraid that talk of the Rapture of the Church and of Christ’s return and other prophetic topics will somehow interfere with “growing their churches.”

How sad but true their collective assessments were. The closer the time comes for Jesus to return to earth and correct this horrendous mess Satan and his minions have made of the planet, the less preachers want to preach it, and the more many in the pews prefer not to hear about it.

I thought while listening: How true it is, the forewarning of Jesus Himself when He asked whether He would find faith on the earth when He comes back.

Those being interviewed in the documentary went into depth about how those with the Holy Spirit were the people mentioned in the parable of the ten virgins. How those who have the Holy Spirit within will go into the Marriage Supper of the Lamb. Those without the “oil for their lamps” (the Holy Spirit) won’t be part of that glorious event. They spoke of how there was great resistance not only to talk of the Rapture, but to the belief that the Holy Spirit even, in fact, exists.

It is abundantly clear that those who don’t even believe the Holy Spirit exists lead the way in the “Rapture resistance” that is the title of this commentary. A study looks more deeply into this tragic, downward spiral in Christendom.

Of an estimated 176 million American adults who identify as Christian, just 6% or 15 million of them actually hold a biblical worldview, a new study from Arizona Christian University shows.

The finding was published by the Cultural Research Center of Arizona Christian University in its recently released American Worldview Inventory, an annual survey that evaluates the worldview of the U.S. adult population. Conducted in February, the survey included a nationally representative sample of 2,000 adults.

The study shows, in general, that while a majority of America’s self-identified Christians, including many who identify as evangelical, believe that God is all-powerful, all-knowing and is the Creator of the universe, more than half reject a number of biblical teachings and principles, including the existence of the Holy Spirit.

Strong majorities also errantly believe that all religious faiths are of equal value, people are basically good and that people can use acts of goodness to earn their way into Heaven. The study further showed that majorities don’t believe in moral absolutes; consider feelings, experience, or the input of friends and family as their most trusted sources of moral guidance; and say that having faith matters more than which faith you pursue. (“Most adult U.S. Christians don’t believe Holy Spirit is real: Study,” by Leonardo Blair, Christian Post Reporter, Christian Post, October 1, 2021)

How accurate this polling research is, I don’t know. But certainly all one has to do is to mention the Rapture to most who claim to be Christians and there is either silence or statements like “I don’t like to think about prophecy. It scares me.”

It apparently scares most pastors, too, but for a different reason—the one mentioned earlier.

To eliminate the Holy Spirit is to eliminate the “hope” that is within the “blessed hope” of Titus 2: 13.

Jesus told the disciples—and us down through the centuries—that if He went away, He would send the “comforter”—the Holy Spirit. God the Holy Spirit (the Third Person of the Triune Godhead) came at Pentecost (see Acts chapter 2) to indwell and comfort believers until Jesus returns bodily to set up His Millennial Kingdom.

The Holy Spirit is the Restrainer (see 2 Thessalonians chapter 2). He holds back full-blown wickedness at this very moment. The Holy Spirit will remove from that office of Restrainer when we who are true believers are taken instantly to be with Christ.

Here is what Jesus said about that moment. And, despite what a number of seminary professors say, it is a Rapture passage—a mystery that the great Apostle Paul would later reveal in His epistles to the Corinthians and Thessalonians.

Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also. (John 14:1–3)

Most people who profess Christianity as their faith base claim to cling to Bible truth. However, it is my observation that the overwhelming majority within these numbers shows little or no understanding of or interest in the signals of the lateness of the times in terms of Bible prophecy.

This dearth of understanding and even of interest stems, no doubt, from churches and their pastors and teachers having little understanding or even interest. People in the pews, in listening to weekly sermons or Sunday school lessons, it is sad to say, are for the most part satisfied with messages that give them comfort—that make them rest easy from the week’s life problems.

While this wanting to forget one’s problems is understandable, it is not altogether what the Lord wants for His children. As a matter of fact, God’s Word warns about these very days and the dangers posed through the following words of the Apostle Paul:

I charge thee therefore before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing and his kingdom; Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables. (2 Timothy 4:1–4)  

We have witnessed over the years many such “turning to fables” because of “strange winds of doctrine” taught by “teachers” to many with “itching ears.” This includes those “teachers” who have predicted the exact date of the Rapture of the Church.

Paul warned Timothy—and all future preachers, teachers, and people in the seats of learning in the church—to be faithful to teaching and heeding biblical truth, to avoid “vain-jangling” (speaking or listening to nonsense). Paul said further, regarding his own faithfulness by example, as recorded just a couple of verses later:

Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day: and not to me only, but unto all them also that love his appearing. (2 Timothy 4:8)

And the last words recorded here are key to this commentary. The great apostle addresses this to all who “love his appearing.” The “his” here is the Lord Jesus Christ, of course. Paul addresses God’s blessings of a crown of righteousness for all “who love his appearing”—the prophesied Second Coming of Christ.

Those who listen and heed Bible prophecy, and who “love his appearing” (are looking for the Rapture—or for His Second Advent if a Tribulation saint) will receive this special crown. Crowns are above and beyond heavenly rewards, as I understand the terms. This “crown” will be one that those who receive it will cast at the Lord’s feet, as praise to the King of all kings. Jesus will be wearing these crowns of praise when He rides the heavenly steed of glistening white during His return as given in Revelation 19:11.

We go deeper into this and what it means in the following brief, but marvelous, Scripture. It is one we often quote.

Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ. (Titus 2:13)

We who claim the holy name of Jesus Christ are to be “looking for the blessed hope.” If we earnestly do so, we will avoid the “vain-jangling” and the false teachings of false doctrine.

While false doctrinal teachings are important to avoid—and this is the main kind of falseness Christians are to avoid—there is another sort that the believer must discern and counter.

I read and listen to so many pundits and writers these days who foretell the direst circumstances imaginable for the nation and world. The troubling thing is that these fear-forecasters are at least partially right in their prognostication of evil and destruction among us now and of things to come.

One such blogcaster tells us that a large portion of the world’s populations will be killed soon through the manipulations of the globalists. The would-be world rulers, he is convinced, are using the vaccine-mandate madness to inject “killer shots” in order to bring down populations to the 500 million-people population as written on the Georgia Guidestones monument.

The communist Chinese, we are told, are about to invade the US, after major cyber and even possible nuclear attacks upon military bases within America.

COVID death camps are scattered across the country and will be used to take all who aren’t vaccinated there to be killed as were Jews and other “undesirables” in the death camps of Hitler’s time.

This blogcaster—who is a very intelligent fellow—believes this with all that is within him, I can tell.

He gives the impression that he believes in God and that God is on our side and we will win (as the human race) against the evil about to assault us.

I must say that if he is a true believer, he is one who is listening to false teachers, both in his time under church leaders and in his time putting together his so-called “intelligence” from wherever he gets his information.

The “intelligence” he and others like him are receiving tells only the half-truth of what is to come. The real truth is found in God’s Word, the Bible.

Paul the apostle said all believers are to look for “the blessed hope”—not for a total world dictatorship–Antichrist.

These evil things are about to happen, to be sure, but not for the Christian.

Where is “the blessed hope” in any of the dire predictions?

We are promised “the blessed hope.” We are told by Jesus Himself, as reported by John the Revelator, to be kept out of even the hour of “temptation”—the Tribulation (Revelation 3:10).

Our Blessed Hope is about to break through the clouds of glory and call God’s children to be with Him forever.

Amen! Even so come, Lord Jesus!

Of all the prophets in God’s Holy Word, to me there are two prophets that stand out as specifically speaking to these times so near the end of the Church Age (Age of Grace).

Paul speaks to the characteristics of end-times mankind through the “perilous times” descriptions in 2 Timothy 3.

We’ve gone over those characteristics many times. People will, Paul foretold, be exactly like they are today—always trending toward ungodliness. Two specific characteristics I’ve probably dissected most are “lovers of self” and “without natural affection.” In the first case, we’ve looked at the Internet, social media, personal devices, and all that points men and women, boys and girls, inward. This takes them away from thinking about God and what life is all about from Heaven’s perspective. The term “selfies” is, to me, the epitome of this inward-turning. It isn’t much of a stretch to understand how destructive this has become to society and culture in America—to the very governing documents the founding fathers gave us—under God’s guidance, I believe.

In the second case, we’ve examined the evil of shedding the blood of the innocents—one of the seven things God says He hates.

Abortion, the murder of babies in their mother’s wombs, is about the most abominable activity we who love the Lord can imagine. Yet society, as a whole, grasps onto this infanticide as a right granted people—most often used to get rid of unwanted baggage that might interfere with the lives of those who want no sexual inhibitions placed upon them by any authority—especially not by any Deity and His Bible.

Also, “without natural affection” means, in my view, the homosexual madness that prevails in this nation. Even psychologists and many within so-called clergy now embrace LGBTQ, etc., as a natural, not “unnatural” comportment.

In my view, the other prophet that is most relevant to our exact time so near Christ’s return is the prophet Daniel.

Whereas Paul spoke for the most part particularly to how things will be in society and culture as the end of the age approaches, Daniel spoke to how things will be in terms of developments in the governments of mankind.

The prophet, we remember, went before King Nebuchadnezzar to interpret his strange dream that none of the soothsayers could even describe, much less interpret, to the worried king. Daniel did this in great detail, laying out the precise order of kingdoms that would develop right up until the time Christ returns to destroy the wickedness of man-made governmental structure. He told how the entire system—the evil, Babylonian system—would meet its end.

Thou, O king, sawest, and behold a great image. This great image, whose brightness was excellent, stood before thee; and the form thereof was terrible. This image’s head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass, His legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay. Thou sawest till that a stone was cut out without hands, which smote the image upon his feet that were of iron and clay, and brake them to pieces. Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold, broken to pieces together, and became like the chaff of the summer threshingfloors; and the wind carried them away, that no place was found for them: and the stone that smote the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth. (Daniel 2:31–35)

The gigantic man-image represented the kingdoms that would come and go. Daniel described how a final world kingdom, represented by the feet and toes of the image, would come into being at the very last of human history. He said a massive stone would fall on the image, strike the feet and toes, and topple the whole monstrous structure. The stone would then crush it to powder and the winds of history would blow it all away as dust, completely and forever destroying all vestiges of human government.

Jesus Christ, of course, is that “stone.” He is the rock the Lord described to Peter in commending Peter for recognizing that He, Jesus, is the “rock” upon which His (Jesus’) Church would be built (Matthew 16:18).

So, considering Paul’s prophecies, we have concluded on a number of occasions that they fit our times perfectly. So we now look briefly at how Daniel’s prophecy here fits our time at this late date on God’s prophetic timeline.

The ten toes of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream-vision represent ten kings and kingdoms yet to be formed at the very end of the age just before Christ’s return. Many prophecy scholars and others have thought this might be a certain configuration of nation-states strictly out of Europe—thus representing the revived Roman Empire.

We now, with all the things that have been developing, can legitimately conjecture whether there is much more involved than merely positioning only Europe in that long-ago prophecy.

The all-consuming dictatorship of the coming Antichrist seems to congeal each day as we get reports of developments. The so-called Deep-State gyrations of wickedness, combined with other dynamics taking place across the world, makes us believe there is much, much more than surmised in our previously thought approach to this great, end-times prophecy by Daniel.

A most recent development in that regard is seen in the following.

In recent years, calls for more coordinated action in the face of China’s increasingly assertive foreign policy have reached something of a crescendo.

It is now not uncommon to hear diplomats and foreign ministers from Brussels to Tokyo asserting that unilateral responses to Beijing’s ever more muscular approach to international affairs are just not enough, and that what is needed now is a more harmonized international response. As the European Union’s top diplomat put it in 2020, in the face of China’s “more assertive – some even say aggressive” behavior, it is “important to have strong cooperation with like-minded democracies. The EU and U.S. should be at the heart of this effort, but we should also be working closely with Japan, India, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and others.”

While specific proposals to achieve this enhanced cooperation are few and far between, there is one idea that seems to be gaining some traction. That is British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s idea that the existing G7 might be transformed into a grouping of the world’s “like-minded democracies” for the purpose of checking China’s more assertive behavior.

The existing G7, of course, is an informal bloc of the seven most advanced industrialized countries. It was created in 1975 to allow its leaders to discuss and exchange ideas on a broad range of issues, including the global economy, security and energy…

The proposed renovation – first floated by the Atlantic Council back in 2008, and likely to be proposed in earnest by Johnson at this year’s G7 summit in June – would involve an expansion of the group’s membership and a refocusing of its efforts. The resulting institution, tentatively dubbed the D-10, would not be an alliance like NATO. Nor would it even be an informal strategic forum like the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue or Quad, a loose coalition involving Japan, Australia, India and the U.S. Rather, as currently envisioned, the D10 would essentially be an informal mechanism for the world’s 10 most important democracies – the G7 states plus India, Japan and South Korea – to cooperatively manage the rules-based international order and to address some of the challenges to that order posed by today’s China. (“The G7 and NATO won’t cut it: Why a new alliance is needed,” Andrew Latham, www.msn.com,, 4/12/21)

The feet and toes of iron mixed with miry clay could be viewed as forming in order to build Antichrist’s final world empire this side of the Second Advent. That governmental structure—whatever its constituency—will be wicked beyond anything mankind has experienced. Forced vaccines and all other overreaches will seem as nothing when the “man of sin” takes over the reins of the final form of the Babylonian system.

Jesus will be that “stone” that will bring that thoroughly beastly rulership down in thunderous collapse.

Even so, come, Lord Jesus!

Some have mockingly termed it “the nanny state.” The nanny state is, according to Wikipedia, a term of British origin that conveys a view that a government or its policies are overprotective or interfering unduly with personal choice. The term likens such a government to the role that a nanny has in child-rearing. An early use of the term comes from Conservative British Member of Parliament Iain Macleod, who referred to “what I like to call the nanny state” in the 3 December 1965 edition of The Spectator.

Harsher terminology for this kind of governance is authoritarian rule or even dictatorship. It is the kind of governmental evil that George Orwell wrote about in his novel 1984, and that Aldous Huxley framed in his fiction work, Brave New World.

However one wants to define it, the Biden government, with the current occupant in the White House laying out the vaccine mandates and other demands that we comply, has made major strides toward installing the sort of government forewarned by both Orwell and Huxley.

I heard a podcast host who has a considerable listenership/viewership asking the question: How have we (the US) come to this point? That is, how have we come from being a representative democracy that was the envy of the world to a nation that now is on the verge of becoming a “risk society.”?

The term was totally new to me. I see America as moving swiftly toward becoming a godless, therefore a reprobate, country, according to the first chapter of Romans (verse 28). But a blog analyst who analyzes America’s declining trajectory from a secular viewpoint uses the term “risk society” in defining the extent to which the nation has devolved.

I have followed Dr. Steve Turley’s podcasts for quite some time and have found his analytical opinion videos to be enlightening and soundly based. So when I heard him asking the question of how we as a nation got to where we are now from the way we were in saner times, calling America now a “risk society,” my curiosity was piqued.

Turley, a college professor, began by saying he was getting questions in his blog-type seminars about why the United States seemed to be turning into a communist state—why America is, day by day, moving toward Marxist-socialism.

He said: “There is, in fact, discernable rationale for how we ended up here. And it’s rooted in what is called a ‘risk society’.”

He then said that a risk society is the way modern globalist societies deal with risk. Expounding upon this, he said it means the way societies deal with insecurities related to potential hazards we might face.

Turley said that every human generation has had to face insecurities and hazards. Traveling from one city to another, for example, presented hazards to eighteenth-century Americans. He said the phrase “Goodbye” (I take it, during that era) was born out of an expression related to dependence upon the higher, heavenly Authority for safety. “Goodbye” is actually the contraction of “The Great God be with thee”.

The professor then made the point that people no longer, as a generational whole, depend upon a personal, religious belief system in keeping them safe from the risks they face each and every day. By this, the takeaway is that people are turning from God and turning instead to something else in which to place their faith.

I couldn’t agree more with this assessment. Just as Turley says, people now look toward government to protect them from the risks they face. Thus, this generation moves farther and farther from the God of Heaven.

One glaring example of this is how the COVID-19 matter has been handled. At least half of America’s population relies on government to be their protector in the matter. There have been much worse epidemics, but never has the population fallen in such a massive way for governmental overreach in forcing compliance to take inadequately tested injections. Freedom is thus eroded; the liberty the founding fathers intended, I believe, has been maliciously attacked in ways yet to be fully manifested.

This is a risk society that has, in many ways, made big government its god. From the invasion and takeover of the public education system; removing prayer and Bible reading from public schools; and constitutionally mandating murder of babies in the womb and even the just-born to inculcating the young with the anti-American rewriting of history; teaching them unnatural, antibiblical ways of sensuality and sexuality; and the insane, upside-down, cancel-culture evil—the risk society wages war against Christianity—against God.

Steve Turley further proposed that such a risk society—one that no longer relies on religious faith whatsoever—turns to advancing technology to mitigate risk. Technological protection requires technocrats—those with knowledge of the technology—to assure the risk is diminished and/or eradicated. This, of course, seems to be the way things are trending toward the establishment of Revelation 13:16–18—the mark of the Beast and all that pertains to it.

There are additional and profound prophetic implications, too, in this matter of a risk society. They are found in the Apostle Paul’s writing.

But of the times and the seasons, brethren, ye have no need that I write unto you. For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night. For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape. (2 Thessalonians 5:1–3)

Paul prophesies that at the end of the Church Age (Age of Grace) when the “day of the Lord” comes, there will be a great cry for “peace and safety.”

This is the “risk society.” There is a great angst among people all over the world for safety against the so-called pandemic. Never before has there been such a worldwide begging for safety. Such a cry could have never happened until the developments in global technologies and technocratic rule of the globalists who, with the principalities and powers of Ephesians 6:12, instituted the implementation of plans to fulfill the satanic blueprint that will eventuate in the buying and selling dictatorship of Revelation 13:16–18.

And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six. (Revelation 13: 16–18)