This Race We Face
Do you sense that time is moving faster than ever before? I must tell you that I sense that the rush of everything going on becomes more intensive by the hour.
We all have had the conversation that when we were younger, time for us seemed to move much more slowly. The older we get, the minutes, hours, days, etc., fly by at a much faster rate.
Maybe it’s just that as our age increases, everything slows down within our own physiology–within our capability to match the speed with things whizzing past us. The race of life in which we must participate, possibly, might simply overwhelm us, and we can no longer keep up. The perception, therefore, might be that time itself is moving ever faster, while that’s not really the case.
Some of you physicists could likely make the case that time is actually speeding up or slowing down, or whatsoever theory science postulates these days. But, the clock still moves one second at a time. We live our own given increments of life one tick at a time like every other of our fellow travelers on the planet. So, it is outside the realm of reality to suppose that the movement of time itself is appreciably changed from the time we were youngsters.
It has to be that the increased activities and events crowding in on our given ticks of the clock have colluded to alter our perception–to make it seem that time is moving more swiftly.
There is not much room for argument that in America today, for many of us, life’s pressures have seemingly compressed our given twenty-four hours. We are indeed racing toward our destinations–our destiny–at ever-increasing speed, it seems.
This column, of course, is called “Nearing Midnight.” The commentaries Todd and I write are focused as much as possible on Bible prophecy. We place Bible prophecy as a template over the issues and events of this, what we believe to be the end-times, generation. We hope thereby to gauge how near human history is to the Second Coming of Christ.
Progression in stage-setting for fulfillment of prophecy is all-important in this gauging effort. How quickly things look to be taking place that line up with what Jesus and the Old and New Testament prophets foretold give some sense of when the Rapture of the Church might occur–i.e., we know that the Rapture of the Church will happen at least seven years prior to Christ’s Second Advent (Revelation 19:11). Therefore, if we consider that things are swiftly moving toward what the prophets say will happen during the post-Rapture era and Daniel’s seventieth week (the Tribulation), we can say with a degree of certitude that Jesus is on the very brink of calling the Church to Himself (Revelation 4:1).
For example, we have witnessed and analyzed the formation of the Gog-Magog coalition of Ezekiel 38 and 39 taking shape at a phenomenal pace. Russia, Iran (Persia), and a number of other entities that hate Israel are gathering.
There is a building world financial crisis that threatens to collapse the global economy. And, in that regard, the internationalist, new-world-order architects are going full steam ahead in their efforts to do away with national sovereignties and to instead bring the world back to Babel. We see the absolutely blatant all-out assault on the U.S. presidential candidate who opposes globalism and calls America back to the founders’ vision for this country.
Mainstream media now admits, through an article by a New York Times former journalist who is now a news media-analyst for the Times that the mainstream news conglomerate is all in for defeating Donald Trump. The writer admits their objective is to see that Trump, whom they claim–as does Barack Obama–is unfit for the land’s highest office never gets into the White House. There’s no longer any pretense of fair and balanced coverage of the candidates.
Prophetically, this fits what Daniel the prophet and John the Revelator foretold. There is to be a revived Roman Empire–a final world empire over which a beast called Antichrist will rule. We are, at this present time in history, caught up in a race politically, prophetically, and personally, as believers.
Politically, we witness the fomenting of chaos in our nation by those who want America brought into conformation with the global blueprint. It is a luciferian plan being carried out by Satan’s human minions. The current presidential administration has taken an active part in creating this chaos, through the Department of Justice (attorney general) actions and in other ways through international diplomacy.
The presidential race is bringing into focus just how determined the fallen one is to bring all mankind into its prophesied final form.
Prophetically, we are racing toward the time when the Lord will catastrophically intervene into the affairs of rebellious mankind. The Church–all born-again believers in Jesus Christ–will be removed and the most terrible time of all human history will begin.
Personally, we who name the name of Christ should all be engaged fully in the race to complete the Lord’s Great Commission while there is yet time to do His work here on earth. There are those in Heaven watching God’s children. They are cheering for believers who are running the race set before us. If you’ve read my book, Rapture Ready…Or Not, you know that I’m convinced with all that is within me that I met some of these heavenly observers on Good Friday, April 22, 2011. AMAZON
Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God. (Hebrews 12:1-2)
Jerusalem’s Burdensome Stone
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu consistently insists Jerusalem will never be parted for the cause of peace negotiations. Despite his playing to the news cameras and to the international community diplomatic forces trying to force the Jewish state to divide the city where Jesus was crucified, when push comes to shove, Netanyahu says a resounding “NO” to Jerusalem being divided.
The prime minister has, as pointed out before, learned to talk the talk in playing the game to agree on matters of forging some sort of a peace. This is a trick long utilized by former terrorist and PLO head Yasser Arafat and most other Islamists when it comes to seeming to agree to move ahead with peace, but always changing some things at just the right time in the process to prevent negotiations from ever actually coming to fruition. Netanyahu, however, makes no bones about the status of Jerusalem in his thinking.
He said, upon becoming prime minister the first time around: “I will never allow Jerusalem to be divided again. Never! Never! We will keep Jerusalem united and … we will never surrender those ramparts… Jerusalem has been the capital of Israel for 3,000 years since the time of King David and we don’t expect to change that for the next 3,000 years!”
His consistent position, despite all of his jockeying to produce sound bites on occasion that make it seem he’s for doing most anything to bring about peace for the region, is as firm as ever. Netanyahu’s position with regard to Jerusalem is unchanged. As time has gone on, he has made his thoughts even more adamant about Jerusalem and what he considers the most vital matter involved in keeping the city undivided.
He continues to say that whoever proposes that giving up the heart of Jerusalem-the Temple Mount-will bring peace, is fatally mistaken. He declared that taking the Temple Mount out of Israeli hands, would bring decline, and even more horrendous radical Islam in the region and in the world…
Netanyahu has said, “Only under Israeli control, will this accessibility… and freedom of religion continue… The Temple Mount is in our hands and … it shall remain in our hands.”
Netanyahu’s assessment of the vital importance of the Temple Mount is far more profound than even he realizes, I suspect. If I might be so bold, I refer to my own writing on the matter, written some years ago.
Mt. Moriah sits at the southern end of the ancient city, crested by a golden dome that represents hundreds of millions whose religion demands of its adherents’ blood-vowed opposition to God’s chosen nation, Israel. This is the place God picked to have His temple on earth constructed. It is the precise location where the third temple will sit, the temple that will be desecrated by Antichrist, earth’s last and most beastly tyrant. Even more importantly, the Temple Mount will be the home of Christ’s Millennial Temple. Moriah, then to be known as Zion, will be supernaturally elevated by the tremendous topographical changes caused when the Lord’s foot touches the Mount of Olives at His return.
Diplomats of the world have, for the past four decades, engaged in effort after effort to bring stability to the region, at whose heart the city of Jerusalem sits. We remember the many jetting’s to and from Washington DC, Jerusalem, and other capitals of the Mideast. From Henry Kissinger, James Baker, Madeleine Albright, and Colin Powell to Condoleezza Rice.
America’s secretaries of state have burned mega-gallons of jet fuel in trying to find the formula for peace that would defuse the Armageddon bomb. And, the former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, immediately upon resigning, was named by the so-called “Quartet” (US, EU, UN and Russia) as the overseer of continuing efforts toward constructing Mideast peace, which has eluded mankind for thousands of years…
To be even more specific about the importance of the temple mount, here is what one of the foremost Christian Hebrew scholars, Arnold Fruchtenbaum, tells us.
The significance of Israel’ s reinstituting the Sanhedrin may be another event that leaves in place the possibility of how the Lord will work out His will with His people. Almost sixty years after a 1900-year absence, the nation of Israel came into existence. Jewish people from the four corners of the world have made Aliyah to live in the Land. The Temple Institute in Jerusalem has reconstructed the instruments for Jewish Temple worship; Jewish men determined to be descendants of Aaron, known as the Kohanim, are being trained in ritual practices to serve as Temple priests; and now we have the establishment of an authoritative body to speak to the nation of Israel on matters of Jewish religion. This is significant in light of such passages as Zechariah 12:10 and Hosea 5:15, which speak of a time when the people of Israel will be led into the acceptance of Jesus as their Messiah. The existence of a religious authority for the entire nation will facilitate the multitudes coming to faith. (Arnold Fruchtenbaum, Ariel Ministries Newsletter, Fall/Winter, 2004)
Make no mistake, the Temple Mount–Mount Moriah—is the burdensome stone that Zechariah the prophet foretold: “And in that day will I make Jerusalem a burdensome stone for all people: all that burden themselves with it shall be cut in pieces, though all the people of the earth be gathered together against it” (Zechariah 12:3).
Deducing Today’s Delusion
The title of this week’s commentary is a proper one, I think. The famous fictional detective invented by mystery author Conan Doyle–Sherlock Holmes–often used the term “deduced” in his brilliant dissection of seemingly unsolvable crimes. He would “deduce,” or conclude, that the circumstances surrounding the mystery had led to the inevitable solving of the murder, theft, or whatsoever the crime involved.
There is no greater mystery than the mystery of iniquity mentioned by Paul the apostle: “For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way” (2 Thessalonians 2:7).
We are presently in the midst of iniquitous circumstance and behavior by a world of rebellious earth dwellers–as the KJV terms the anti-God masses of humanity that will one day suffer God’s wrath and judgment. At the heart of the mystery of iniquity that surrounds us is a growing evil spiritual dementia that is setting the stage for the prophecy given through the apostle Paul. The prophecy is from the same section of the second letter to the Thessalonians above: “And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness” (2 Thessalonians 2:11-12).
I think it is patently obvious to any true student of Bible prophecy that we are witnessing a form of spiritual dementia–of upside-down thinking each and every day. This evil darkening of the ability to think sanely, morally, comes from precisely the anti-God rebelliousness the great apostle warned about in his letter to the Romans:
And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient; Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, Without understanding, covenant breakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful: Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them” (Romans 1 28-32)
I believe it is relatively easy to deduce from things taking place all around us today that the delusion Paul forewarns will be full-blown when the Holy Spirit withdraws as restrainer of evil is even now developing. As a matter of fact, my own conclusion is that the satanically inflicted dementia is already rather far advanced. The evidence grows hour by hour that we are in a world going mad with luciferian rage.
Let’s examine that evidence to see if we are on to something, as Sherlock Holmes might say…
* Economic Irrationality
As oft is said about insanity, as attributed first to Albert Einstein, the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over to solve a problem although it fails every time and expecting a different result.
This is exactly where today’s thinking is at this hour of history in America. The government runs the Treasury printing presses over and over to produce trillions of dollars with nothing to back them in order to solve the national economic woes, which only get worse and worse.
Lyndon Johnson’s presidential administration conducted a War on Poverty to produce a Great Society. Since that 1964 all-out effort to solve America’s differences in the plight of the have-nots vs. the haves, the poverty has only increased. More than $22 trillion has been thrown at the problems involved. The nation is now bankrupt for all practical purposes, and the national debt grows exponentially.
It’s the same all over the world. Nations are in dire economic chaos, and the global economic structure–for the most part inextricably linked to the U.S. dollar–is on the brink of collapse. Only the staying hand of Almighty God is keeping global depression beyond any ever experienced from happening.
Yet, the powers that be continue to use the same methodologies time and time again in their insane effort to somehow get a different result.
* Diplomatic Dementia
The international community of diplomat’s views Israel as the hold-up to peace. This, even though Israel is a thin sliver of a nation that threatens no other nation, but provides vast goods and inventive services to the whole world.
Israel’s enemies, on the other hand–the Arab nations that surround the Jewish state–threaten to annihilate the tiny nation on a daily basis. Israel offers to sit down and come to peace with those who hate them, but the Arab states won’t even recognize Israel as a country. Yet the United Nations as a whole blames Israel for not being willing to give their enemies the land they want. The land Israel’s antagonists want, of course, is the very buffer territory that gives Israel a degree of protection from their enemies, who have attacked them in three major wars.
The diplomats cannot understand or refuse to recognize the true problem in the region. It is a satanically spawned dementia that dominates their thinking.
* Societal insanity
Can there be much argument that we are faced with a culture seemingly gone mad, considering things we see transpiring as of late?
What were just a few short years ago designated mental/psychological disorders are now proclaimed to be normal human behavior. As a matter-of-fact, there now are laws that demand we assign things like homosexuality, trans-gender identification and other conditions formerly considered aberrant or abnormalities special status, warranting privileged treatment –or else.
The absolute insanity of making us agree, through legal stipulation, that men, if they feel like a woman on any given hour or day, must be allowed to go into women’s restrooms, should speak for the far advanced state of reprobate thinking in which we find ourselves. The evidence makes it a no-brainer to deduce that there is already considerable delusion in society and culture today.
I’m sure you can think of dozens of things going on in society and culture that are even more bizarre.
* Religious Reprobate Reasoning
Religious delusion at this time of the end of the age is running wild. God’s Word, Jesus Himself, says that the Son of God is the only Way to God the Father–to Heaven.
Even some “evangelical” ministries are now wanting to make nice with apostate religionists within Christianity. Even more deludedly, they are reaching out to embrace other religions that will have nothing to do with Jesus Christ as a spiritual factor, much less as Deity who offers the only Way to their perverse version of Heaven.
Crislam, the combining of Christianity and Islam, is one such effort sponsored by some well-known supposed Christian leaders. Recently, Pope Francis was interviewed on a flight returning to the Vatican. He was recorded saying over and over that Islam is a religion of peace and that it presents only love, not danger, to mankind.
Following the murder of a Catholic priest in northern France by those who claimed the act was done for Allah, the pope opined the following:
I think it is not right to identify Islam with violence…This is not right, and it is not true…I don’t like to talk about Islamic violence because each day when I read the paper I see violence here in Italy…Terrorism is born of worshipping money in a capitalist society. I know it dangerous to say this, but terrorism grows when there is no other option and when money is made a god, and it, instead of the person, is put at the center of the world economy…That is the first form of terrorism. That is a basic terrorism against all of humanity.
Pope Francis has said on occasion that Christianity and Islam are both religions of conquest, and he has blamed Western thinking and interference in the Middle East as responsible for the rise of Islamic extremism. “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!” (Isaiah 5:20).
It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to deduce that the end times delusion Paul prophesied for the Tribulation period as recorded in 2 Thessalonians chapter 2 has truly already infected this pre-Tribulation era.
Welfare World Order
Watchmen on the wall should be alert as never before. It is becoming clearer by the day. The self-appointed governing elitists of planet earth are using the slothful inclination of fallen mankind as fuel for the engine of their drive toward a new world order.
We witness time after time the bringing down by angry voters European leaders who aren’t totally sold out to the socialistic promises of something for nothing–or at least many handouts for very little work in return by the citizenry of the nations they serve. We thereby begin to understand the means by which the Antichrist regime will eventuate. Chaos in the streets translates to first untenable, unsustainable promises by elected politicians to quell the unrest. Then, eventually, an absolute iron fist of control as forecast in Revelation 13:16-18 will be used to bludgeon resisters into submission to the beast-state.
One blog pundit recently interviewed an insider to the world economic elite. I’m not certain about the multibillionaire interviewee’s position within the global economic order of things, but his commentary in answering seems to indicate he sees great danger in the machinations of his peers who are part of the new tower of Babel builders.
Multi-billionaire Hugo Salinas Price told the blogger news service interviewer that the globalists elite plan to control the world. Now, that’s not a surprise to biblical prophecy watchmen. We of the literal view of Bible prophecy who comment on such matters have written countless times about this plan. We have done so, resisting the conspiracy-theorist mentality that tends to set dates and name names as if we were Old Testament prophets. The observations from a globalist insider, on the other hand, present possibilities too fascinating to resist reporting. Salinas told his interviewer that the globalists’ plan to completely rebuild the world order into a new one is a disturbing fact as time moves forward. He said:
“The problems we are seeing in the West are not going to be resolved in any positive way. What we have had in the West, in recent decades, has been the welfare state. The welfare state is, in my view, what I would call, “socialism light.” We’ve had “socialism light” and now we’re going to transition to full-blown socialism… [It is these] elite, who do not want to give up their control. The furtherance of their control lies in socialism.
“I think this comes from a central idea that has possessed the imagination of the world. It’s the idea that authority comes from below. In other words, that authority comes from the people. This idea of authority from the will of the people is a myth of our civilization…
“I’m just saying that those who control the world know they have to curry the favor of the people. To do this they went the way of the welfare state, and democracy to give people the fiction they (the people) are in control. Well, they are not and never have been.” (Eric King, Billionaire Hugo Salinas Price – Elites Plan to Control the World, KingWorldNews.com)
To watchmen on the wall, it is increasingly clear that what Mr. Salinas reports is based in truth. And it is easy to observe that America is in the cross hairs of those who are targeting the United States for the new world order methodologies with regard to bringing about the ever-increasing welfare state. This nation is on the fast track to becoming the completely changed nation Barack Obama promised during his first presidential campaign.
Added to the continuing push to garner ever-increasing votes through pandering to welfare recipients –and I mean those who “won’t” work, not those who “can’t” work—is the deliberate stirring of America’s malcontents. The Black Lives Matter, and other groups that are basically thugs for hire who foment chaos, in combination with feeding the welfare discontent with trillions of out of control, printing press dollars, constitute a deadly formula designed to bring America down. The purpose is so that Satan can bring in his long-desired one-world order over which Antichrist will reign for a time.
The United states is the hold-up. As the lone national entity still strong enough to resist the subduing of national sovereignty in order to make all people under one, central, authority world-wide, the globalist elite, under Satan’s authority whether they know it or not, must destroy America as it currently exists. The U.S. dollar must be taken away as the prime currency to which all others are in one way or another inextricably linked. Revelation 13: 16-18 outlines Satan’s ultimate plan in this regard.
Olivet Overview – Part 1 – By Ed Wood
Many years ago I had the privilege of conducting a monthly Bible Prophecy study with a group of about half a dozen people. I had even then been long interested in this subject, but in order to do a credible job I really had to do some further studying. As I did I came to the conclusion that even though what has become the Olivet Discourse, detailed in Matthew 24, Mark 13, and Luke 21 came much later than the prophetic texts of the Old Testament, it forms a unifying foundation for all of them plus the Book of Revelation which was written some sixty years later.
In this increasingly turbulent time when it seems that the entire world is rapidly heading toward a very grim future, it seems that the opportunity to examine what Jesus himself revealed about the days immediately prior to his return would be prudent. I would first suggest to the reader that he or she read the gospel passages listed above in order to get the most out of this series of articles. Let’s begin!
An Already Completed Prophecy
1) THE TEMPLE IS DESTROYED [Matt. 24:1-2; Mark 13:1-2; Luke 21:5-6]
In 70 A.D. the temple was totally destroyed by the Roman soldiers led by Titus, the emperor Vespasian’s son. Jesus had said that the destruction would be total; “There shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.”
This occurred in 70 A.D. in exactly the way Jesus described almost 40 years earlier by the Roman soldiers under command of Titus, the son of Emperor Vespasian. The devastation was indeed total, and it is quite likely that the stones themselves were pulled apart from each other to get the gold from the temple treasury that had melted in the heat of the fire which was set to destroy the entire complex.
The noted historian Josephus’ account from War of the Jews, Book 6, chapter 5, verse 2 lends credence to this supposition:
And now the Romans, judging that it was in vain to spare what was round about the holy house, burnt all those places, as also the remains of the cloisters and the gates, two excepted; the one on the east side, and the other on the south; both which, however, they burnt afterward. They also burnt down the treasury chambers, in which was an immense quantity of money, and an immense number of garments, and other precious goods there reposited; and, to speak all in a few words, there it was that the entire riches of the Jews were heaped up together, while the rich people had there built themselves chambers [to contain such furniture].
Prophecies in Progress
2) FALSE PROPHETS, FALSE DOCTRINE [Matt. 24:4-5,11,23-28; Mark 13:6,21-23; Luke
21:8]: This is not confined to the false religions or cults today, though there are multitudes of these, but most disturbing has been the corruption of doctrine now under way in many of the large denominations of the nominally Christian church in Europe and North America. Heresy was always a problem in even Paul’s time, as many of his epistles demonstrate, but today it is pandemic. The sad fact is that perhaps most of the Western Church has abandoned the authority of the Bible and its fundamental precepts such as Jesus being the only means of salvation, heterosexual relations between married people as the only ones acceptable to God, and even the masculine gender of God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
3) WARS [Matt. 24:6-7; Mark 13:7-8a; Luke 21:9-10]: The Twentieth Century produced more casualties due to war than any time previously and the Twenty-First Century now sees a rapid and increasing instability in the Middle East. The increase in Islamic terrorism with such new and militant entities such as ISIS is now reaching across the planet even to the United States and Europe.
4) FAMINE [Matt. 24:7b; Mark 13:8b; Luke 21:11] According to the latest figures, the world’s reserve food supplies are dwindling and the prices are increasing, due in no small past to weather factors. The effect is that more people are going hungry and this in itself has led to civil unrest.
5) NATURAL DISASTERS [Matt. 24:7b; Mark 13:8b; Luke 21:11,25b]: The horrendous series of earthquakes in Japan half a decade ago and overall increase in seismic activity from 2002 onward clearly demonstrate that geologically speaking, something unprecedented has begun and though the counts have decreased in the past few years, the trend shows no signs of returning to the relatively quiescent levels of the past. Additionally, we are seeing extremes in weather all across the planet almost on a daily basis more profound than any humanity has experienced in historical times.
6) PEOPLE BECOMING MORE HOSTILE [Matt. 24:12]: For everyone who watches TV or reads the newspapers, the increase in violence and horrific crime is unmistakable. Most recently we’ve seen more violence in our schools and universities, tragic shootings of civilians and police officers, and the increase of Islamic terrorism with ISIS becoming a major factor in this.
7) CHRISTIANS PERSECUTED [Matt. 24:9-10; Mark 13:9-13; Luke 21:12-17]: In officially atheistic countries and those in which Islam predominates, more and more Christians are being targeted with violence and even death. For example in countries such as Iran, the population of Christians is in serious decline. We may not realize it here in America, but there really are places in the world where standing up for Jesus can still be a cause for martyrdom.
Yet even in regions which are still considered predominantly Christian, those who hold to the authority of the Bible and its moral standards are finding themselves increasingly marginalized. In the United States it became “official on June, 17 1963 when the Supreme Court in the case of Murray v Vitale decided in an 8 to 1 vote to effectively kick prayer out of our public schools. Now just about any time there is some public event in which the name of Jesus Christ is raised in prayer, there tends to be a big noise from those who’ve obviously decided that the First Amendment applies only to themselves and not to Christians. This nationally increasing departure from Judeo-Christian principles was tragically demonstrated again by the Supreme Court in the Roe v Wade case in which gave its approval to what I believe can only be called legalized infanticide of the unborn.
Unfortunately the attack against biblical standards has not confined itself to the secular world but has also invaded the major branches of Protestantism not only in the United States, but Canada and Europe as well. For example, the Episcopal Church has not only given approval to homosexual behavior but allows actively homosexual clergy. The Evangelical Lutheran Church, Presbyterian Church are but two more examples of major denominations which have embraced what the Bible clearly relates is an aberrant and sinful lifestyle. Yet this is but one symptom of the overall descent of these churches into heresy and apostasy as many reject even the core belief in Jesus and him alone as being the only means of salvation.
8) GOSPEL PREACHED WORLDWIDE [Matt. 24:14; Mark 13:10]: When Gutenberg first invented a printing press with movable type, it was the beginning of a revolution when books could be reproduced at a cost which put them into the price range that common people could afford. A major step toward the realization of Jesus’ prophecy began in 1456 with the production of a Latin Bible from his device. Now the Bible in its various version and languages are available across the world. With the advent of computer and communications technology it is literally possible for anyone on the planet to read or hear God’s Word. (Which means that when the Lord does return there will be little excuse for someone’s protestation of ignorance!)
9) FAMILIES IN STRIFE [Mark 13:12; Luke 21:16]: Once the solid bedrock of any society, the conventional family is becoming increasingly dysfunctional on many levels with the children generally showing the greatest adverse effects. In many families even in the U.S., kids are being raised in single-parent households. One parent is then called upon to do the job that God intended for two, especially when the other biological parent is disinterested and indifferent. One can easily imagine how the children in such circumstances can have trust issues – after all if I can’t trust Dad or Mom, how can I trust a stranger? This situation can also be profound if one or both parents are abusive. How many times are we seeing “adult-level” crimes now being perpetrated by “children” now? Too many, I would say.
Another factor damaging the traditional family, in my opinion, is the increasing acceptance by the more affluent countries of homosexual behavior to the point where same-sex couples are routinely allowed to adopt children. One can only wonder what the long-term effects of being raised in an environment might lead? Lately we have seen “gender identity” issues rise to at a level that they are being noticed by the media. Personally, I find it alarming in that it seems like more and more people have become so confused that as far as gender goes, they don’t know what they are anymore! It is a sad commentary on any society whose moral decline only exacerbates such confusion and if one looks at the great powers of the past which likewise did so did not retain their status.
I believe Jesus was saying such conditions of moral decay would be widespread in the times just before his return:
Luke {17:28-30} Likewise also as it was in the days of Lot; they did eat, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded; But the same day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven, and destroyed [them] all. Even thus shall it be in the day when the Son of man is revealed.
During the Tribulation, one can only expect that this will worsen as family members turn against each other, reporting “subversive” actions not in accord with the One World Government ruled by the worst despot in history. (Daniel 8:9 – 12); Revelation chapter 13) We can look toward Nazi Germany and Communist Russia as infamous examples of this very thing. Perhaps we can look at those Mark and Luke passages which present family strife as a transitional phase, already partially fulfilled but well on the way to becoming a lot worse in the days ahead.
Next time we’ll look at what may be just up ahead for a world rapidly heading for the most grim time in history.
THE OLIVET DISCOURSE – WHAT JESUS TOLD US TO EXPECT
| by Ed Wood | ||||
| Status | EVENT | BIBLE REFERENCE | ||
| Matthew | Mark | Luke | ||
| D | TEMPLE DESTROYED | 24:1-2 | 13:1-2 | 21:5-6 |
| I | FALSE PROPHETS | 24:4-5,11,23-28 | 13:5-6; 21-23 | 21:8 |
| I | WARS | 24:6-7 | 13:7-8a | 21:9-10 |
| I | FAMINE | 24:7 | 13:8b | 21:11 |
| I | EARTHQUAKES &
NATURAL DISASTERS |
24:7 | 13:8b | 21:11,25b |
| I | PEOPLE GET WORSE | 24:12 | ||
| I | CHRISTIANS PERSECUTED | 24:9-10 | 13:9-13 | 21:12-15 |
| I | GOSPEL PREACHED WORLDWIDE | 24:14 | 13:10 | |
| I | FAMILIES IN STRIFE | 13:12 | 21:16 | |
| DURING THE TRIBULATION | ||||
| F | ABOMINATION OF DESOLATION * | 24:15-22 13:14-16 | (See ** below) | |
| F | JERUSALEM SURROUNDED ** | 24:15-20 13:14-18 | 21:20-24 | |
| F | GREAT TRIBULATION | 24:21-25 13:19-20 | 21:25-26 | |
| F | SIGNS IN THE HEAVENS | 24:29 13:24 -25 | 21:11,25-26 | |
| F | SIGN OF JESUS | 24:30
THE MILLENNIUM BEGINS |
||
| F | JESUS RETURNS | 13:26 | 21:27 | |
| F | ELECT GATHERED | 24:31 13:27
NOTES: |
||
D = DONE
I = IN PROGRESS (But we can expect all of these to intensify as time goes by.) F = FUTURE EVENT
* Jesus told us here that the antichrist will desecrate the temple as did Antiochus IV Epiphanes as related in Daniel 8:9-14. In Daniel 9:27, the prophet describes a second similar desecration of the temple in the midst of the antichrist’s one “week” (seven years) reign.
** Luke’s version omits the mention of the Abomination. Perhaps it relates the siege of Titus in 70 A.D.
while Matthew and Mark’s versions refer to that second event that Jesus mentioned which will occur during the Tribulation.
Devil Seeks to Warm Mankind
Satan is often portrayed, or at least thought of, as ruling over a Dante’s Inferno–like domain. He is in his red union suit, his barbed tail wagging as his tight grin of evil is framed between his goatee and horns that protrude angrily above devilish eyebrows and red, glowing eyes.
Hades smolders around him as he relishes the next human victims he can entice into his hot, sulfurous kingdom. His intention is to see all of God’s creation called man forever suffer in this eternally hot abode.
Truth is that only the last part of that portrayal has Biblical validity. The devil does want every human being to suffer eternity apart from their Creator. The abyss (Tartarus) and eventually the lake of fire will be the final destination for lost humanity. Lucifer the fallen one —the devil— however, will not rule over the place called hell. He will be the one being there who suffers most, according to God’s truth about the matters involved.
The old serpent, however, is at present dealing with issues of heating things up and trying to lure people on board. Tragically, many are falling for his siren call to jump aboard the global warming (now changed to climate change) bandwagon.
I have written about it in Rapture Ready…Or Not: 15 Reasons This Is the Generation That Will Be Left Behind, and in many articles. The lie that global warming (climate change) will make earth uninhabitable, is the rallying cry for the push for one-world order. It indeed is at the heart of the blueprint the globalist elitists are using to construct Antichrist’s hell on earth.
America’s secretary of state and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency forces are raging ahead full-blast to bring this nation into the blueprint knowing that the Obama Administration has less than one half-year to do so. America, as I have also written many times, must be brought down from its super power status. The U.S. must be made to conform with the misery the globalists have helped much of the world achieve in order to make all on the planet look to them for solutions.
John Kerry, unknowingly, is doing his dead-level best to do the devil’s work, in my humble view. He wants to warm us up considerably in order to somehow attain the utopian dreams he and the new world order builders want to construct.
Science proves almost on an hourly basis the lie that is global warming-climate change, about which Kerry and the others are wringing their hands as they fear-monger. They, with the help of national and international media, none-the-less, move forward at foolhardy, breakneck speed.
Like all of the other reprobate (upside-down) unreasonableness they foist, they believe that making us warmer by taking away the comfort of our air-conditioners is part of the answer. Despite the great heat they say is about to make planet earth like Venus or some other hellish planetary orb, they want to do away with the very thing that can make us comfortably cool. —Thus although, again, the science continues to prove in every instance that the earth isn’t heating up, but, actually, is cooling.
All one must do to understand the truth of the matter is to remember the global warmists that got caught in a growing field of solid ice a few years ago. They had to be rescued by ice-breaker ships as they moved toward the Arctic Circle in an attempt to gather evidence that the earth is warming.
Yet John Kerry, on behalf of this lame-duck administration, is doing all possible to bring America’s sovereignty down so the global order can proceed uninhibited. He, like Mr. Obama, gives this insanely wrong matter —global warming— greater priority than the true threat we face —Islamist terrorism. The following news item excerpts frames the madness:
“Secretary of State John Kerry said in Vienna on Friday that air conditioners and refrigerators are as big of a threat to life as the threat of terrorism posed by groups like the Islamic State.
“The Washington Examiner reported that Kerry was in Vienna to amend the 1987 Montreal Protocol that would phase out hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, from basic household and commercial appliances like air conditioners, refrigerators, and inhalers.
““As we were working together on the challenge of [ISIS] and terrorism,” Kerry said. “It’s hard for some people to grasp it, but what we–you–are doing here right now is of equal importance because it has the ability to literally save life on the planet itself.”…
“Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy was also present at the negotiations and is serving as lead negotiator for the United States. McCarthy has said that her goal is to enact the HFC agreement by the end of the year.
“The EPA rules along with the global deal would ban HFC in the United States and would push for alternative chemicals for use in appliances.
“The negotiations are part of President Obama’s climate agenda to combat global climate change.” (Source: Kerry: Air conditioners as big a threat as ISIS by Alyssa Canobbio, Published July 23, 2016, Washington Free Beacon).
That old serpent, Satan, wants to warm us all, apparently, even before the lost, wretched souls among humanity reach that final, ultimately, fiery-hot destination. The globalist would-be masters, wittingly or unwittingly, are carrying out Lucifer’s blueprint for constructing his Antichrist’s world disorder.
God’s Word —the Bible— has forewarned of this present state of last days danger. The Lord is in control, but he has given us the good sensibility, and the marvelous privilege in this still free nation to vote for liberty rather than for tyranny.
Prayer and exercising the vote our forefathers built into the Constitution is still our right. Doing so, in sufficient numbers, will perhaps assure that we as believers continue to have the right to also carry out our Lord’s Great Commission beyond this political season.
Meantime let us also do—and with increased faith and vigor— as Jesus instructed as recorded in Luke 21: 28, and as Paul wrote as given in Titus 2: 13.
Tim LaHaye Memorial Information
For those in California who may be interested and able to attend:
Celebration of Life service for Tim LaHaye
Aug. 12, at 10:00 am
Shadow Mountain Community Church
2100 Greenfield Dr.
El Cajon, Ca 92021
Cards can be mailed to:
Beverly LaHaye
c/o Tim LaHaye Ministries
PO BOX 21796
El Cajon, CA 92021
In lieu of flowers the family requests donations be sent to:
San Diego Christian College
200 Riverview Pkwy.
Santee, CA 92071
At Sodom’s Gate
My mind is impressed, as the day of Israel’s 70th birth into the modern era looms in 2018, that God’s dealing with man seems about to make full circle. By that, I mean that the Book given to humanity that is his love letter and His manual for living life on this planet, given through His chosen nation, opens, in my spiritual mind, to the pages of the time of Lot and his life in Sodom.
It seems to me that we can sense, if we consider the headlines today, the angels of judgment at the gates of our own nation. Are they there, sent by the Lord of Heaven, after having entertained the efforts of God’s servants–like Abraham those thousands of years ago—to find, percentage-wise, ten righteous people who have a heart for the things of the Lord?
Israel is the prototype nation–i.e., all successive nations have had Israel to use as a template of how to act, not act, react, and conduct the affairs within the human conditions of their time in the spotlight of history. We are at just such a time of examination, in my estimation, of our own much blessed country.
It is striking to me that a first-time author hit it big just a few years ago with a book that deals almost precisely with the premise of this commentary. The Harbinger by Jonathan Cahn used just such a template to dissect the Almighty’s dealings with Israel as juxtaposed against the recent history of America.
This isn’t a review of that book –I wrote my thoughts on that volume shortly after it’s release– so I won’t say a great deal about it. Suffice it to say that I find the relevant points of similarities between the two nations quite remarkable, as presented by the author. I recall my own opening remarks in a book written not long after the attacks on the U.S. of September 11, 2001, as I reflect on what Mr. Cahn wrote.
Television screens across America and the world repeatedly flashed videotape of the huge passenger jet crashing full-throttle into the enormous building. Dazed people watched in awestruck disbelief while trapped victims leaped from the building’s top floors, some holding hands with others when they jumped. The massive twin towers disintegrated and crumbled to flaming rubble. It was the most heinous terrorist attack ever recorded. Almost immediately, angry, frightened people began demanding answers to the insanity now forever etched in their memories. Many churches were filled the Sunday following the attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. There was an instinctive sense that those murderous acts of terrorism were somehow foreordained. That the carnage now known as “Ground Zero” and the uncertain future is, in some troubling way, linked by prophetic destiny. (Prophecy at Ground Zero: From Today’s Middle East Madness to the Second Coming of Christ.)
The author of The Harbinger reached much of the same sorts of conclusions as did the authors who collaborated with me in our book, released in 2002. He got much more specific about Ground Zero in Lower East Manhattan than did we, providing some really chilling similarities between things written in prophecy about Israel and their fulfillment, and what has happened in America since that fateful 9/11 date. He did a credible job of postulating–with strong scriptural backing—on how the U.S. judgment looks to have begun taking place in earnest at the time the towers fell on September 11, 2001.
The bottom line is that the increasingly evil acts by terrorists and other events of late bring home in an almost eerie way that the angels of judgment must be at the very gates of our own nation. We have long recounted the many signals of impending prophetic fulfillment. The nation Israel is at the center of hatred in the U.N.; the reviving Roman Empire is rearranging daily into prophetic configuration; the plan to make Israel give up land for peace is being pushed to make that nation conform to the wishes of the international community; the world is moving swiftly toward one world–especially toward global economy that threatens to bring the dollar down and install some sort of electronic funds transfer system.
As if that weren’t enough evidence of where we stand on God’s prophetic timeline, there is Russia, Iran, Turkey, and the whole Islamic world coming together in a way that indicates the Gog-Magog prophecy of Ezekiel 38-39 is shaping for soon fulfillment. China represents a growing hegemonic threat not only in all of Asia, but in the whole world, economically speaking.
And now, astonishingly, a sitting president of the United States for the first time puts America directly at the gates of Sodom with his declaration that marriage should be made legal as between a man and a man and a woman and a woman. That is, it would indeed be astonishing—except that the U.S. citizenry have been desensitized by years of news and entertainment media inculcation, putting forward the idea that there is no difference between heterosexual and homosexual relationships.
So, where at one time–no more than a decade and a half ago—an incumbent president proposing such a thing would have sealed the defeat of his political party defeat, we now have no way of knowing if it will adversely affect his party’s candidate (whose ideology in such anti-God matters are exactly the same) in her election bid.
Again, we hear the words of Jesus echo in forewarning of when He will next catastrophically intervene into earth’s history: “Likewise also as it was in the days of Lot; they did eat, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded; But the same day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven, and destroyed them all. Even thus shall it be in the day when the Son of man is revealed” (Luke 17:28-30).
Terry James Prophecy Line 